viduals who own modern buildings usually abandon the management of them after they have tried it long enough to learn that it is a distinct business, requiring expert direction. They turn it over to some real estate firm that has a staff of men who do nothing else. There is the manager or superintendent of buildings, who is an able organizer of men and a keen executive. Under him is a corps of renting agents and collectors, bookkeepers who carry the general account of expenses for all the buildings and separate individual and proportionate accounts of each owner. Outside this office staff there are an inspector, who visits each building every day, and a machinist, an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, and a painter, whose duty it is to direct repairs. Then, each building has its own janitor, with his squad of hall and elevator men, scrubwomen, sweepers, moppers, dusters, and outside window-cleaners; and the engineer, with his assistants, electrician, and firemen. The janitor makes weekly reports in writing to the central office of repairs, of changes, complaints, and requests of tenants, while the engineer accounts for the coal and other supplies used by him in amounts and in the power expended in heat, light, and elevators. The cost of maintenance for a year, including taxes, insurance, supplies, repairs, and service, is from two to three per cent. of the capital invested, and increases with the age of the building. One manager, who had eleven years' experience in a building about fifteen years old, said he spent an average of $5.50 a day to repair pipes and plumbing; $4 a day for bricking and tiling; he replaced 2,000 of his 11,000 lights a year; bought sixteen tons of coal a day. But the new methods of construction of everything that goes into the later buildings are expected, and indeed promise, to reduce these items to absurdities. The latter-day managers are setting the builders, contractors, and man ufacturers who supply the plant fresh problems of economy by their close figuring on expenses. A boiler that needs more than so much per pound of power for repairs is not satisfactory. Masonry must wear only so much a cubic foot a year to be within the specifications. Lights and plumbing and wiring and tubing that have to be renewed at a cost of more than so many cents per thousand feet are charged up against the supplier of them; and the manager is equally exacting with himself. He doles out coal at so many tons the week per thousand cubic feet of rentable space, and hires scrub-women on the basis of 32,000 square feet of floor a day for each mop. Despite all his precise reckoning, however, and his reduction of the problem to an accuracy of calculation that is almost scientific, the inexorable laws of the market gradually cut down his income. The building earns less year by year. The manager's own requirements of economy and ingenuity of construction involve the solution of fresh problems, lowering the cost of building, which entails the increase of new and higher structures; and that carries with it higher values of the ground built on, and correspondingly lower rents. But it is capital that loses by the inevitable process, capital and labor. Competition and progress reduce the one to two or three per cent. a year, the other to $1.50 a day. But the same forces stir up brains and strengthen character; they develop a sky-scraping builder, earning $50,000 a year, whose name is an advertisement for the buildings he puts up, out of a master mason who began life as a bricklayer. And the end is not yet; our cities, as their ragged sky-lines show, will be rebuilding for many years to come. The grind between capital and labor will go on, while the financier, the architect, the builder, the manager-the brains of business enterprise-will grow and profit mightily. JOHN CABOT By the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava of his followers put together. Before, however, referring to such details as we possess of John Cabot's expedition, it may be well to glance at the geographical notions which were current at this period. WHEN dealing with the life and work of John Cabot one is tempted to follow the example of the author of a famous book on Iceland, who, having devoted a chapter to "A description of the snakes of Iceland," fell back for its contents on the statement, Many circumstances indicate that, about "There are no snakes in Iceland." In our the commencement of the fifteenth century, case less succinctness is possible, for John one of those waves of impulse, which, from Cabot certainly existed, though in so hazy time to time, descend like a mysterious afa condition that many of his biographers flatus upon the world, had begun to imhave confounded him with his son Sebas- pregnate the minds of men with a longing tian, and have eked out the biography of for maritime adventure, and to inflame the one with particulars incident to the ca- their imaginations with the expectation of reer of the other. It may be questioned discoveries fraught with undreamt of feliciwhether an impersonality of the kind is not ties. A principal cause for this may be advantageous to the estimate formed of traced to the revival of learning, and esany considerable man by his fellow-creat- pecially to the recovery of the forgotten ures, for while his achievements survive to treasures of Greek literature. During the speak for him, less hold is left for the fangs dark ages, and under the artless guidance of the sporting resurrectionists who make of ecclesiastical tradition and monkish a prey of great reputations-a fate which scholasticism, the science of geography had Tennyson so dreaded, and which Shake- gone completely astray. The early Chrisspeare has escaped. About Columbus, tian maps of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh thanks to his correspondence, his journals, centuries are all of the same character. his reports to Ferdinand and Isabella, with The world is represented as a flat disc, or the additional light-or darkness-fur- square, or oblong, surrounded by a canalnished by his enemies, we know everything, like ocean, with Jerusalem in the exact cenwith the result that a distinguished English tre. The leading cities, splendidly fortified, writer has recently denounced him as "the are stuck down around an amorphous paragon of slave-dealers," or in some such Mediterranean choked with islands. Paraopprobrious terms. His name, at all events, dise and its rivers are duly portrayed, and is in everyone's mouth. And yet the little- the whole scheme is surmounted by the fignoticed voyage of our obscure and shad- ures of Adam and Eve in paradisiacal cosowy Cabot, though in itself far less merito- tume. As time goes on, instead of improvrious as an original and daring enterprise, ing, the map-making of the world still furhas been fraught with more far-reaching ther deteriorates; for travellers' tales now and beneficent consequences to the human begin to confuse and corrupt the simplicity race than all the exploits of Columbus and of the early cartography, and the picture of The illustrations for this article have been selected by Mr. Wilberforce Eames, of the Lenox Library, New York. At the earth is overlaid or distorted by the introduction of mermaids, men without heads, or wearing their faces in their stomachs, unicorns, centaurs, and griffins, until its configuration assumes the appearance of a nightmare or a zoological garden. It is true that the geographical lore of the ancients, as summarized by Ptolemy, happily continued to survive, more or less intact, in the literature of the Arabs; but the speculations of the Mohammedan world, whose loadstone was Mecca, were naturally attracted to the regions of the south and east, and the travels and adventures of Sindbad the Sailor embalm the stories told by many a vagrant Syrian or Egyptian merchant on his return from Persia, India, and China, in the one direction, or from Zanzibar and Madagascar in the other. a later period, indeed, the western Arabs made excellent pirates, and terrorized the shores of both Europe and Africa, nay, even of America and England, but for many hundred years the whole Arab race had the deepest horror of the Atlantic, and calumniated its blue loveliness by calling it the green sea of darkness," while their learned doctors declared that a man mad enough to tempt its dangers ought to be deprived of his civil rights. The conjectures, consequently, of the classic philosophers, and the hints scattered up and down Greek poetry of mysterious coasts and islands beyond the setting sun, failed to engage their attention, and as at this time their supremacy in Spain and Portugal, as well as in Morocco, barred the way of the maritime states of Christendom to the coast, the expanse of waters that rolled and tumbled beyond the pillars of Hercules remained a “Mare Clausum" long after a considerable knowledge had been gained not only of the Arabian and Indian Seas, but even of the hithermost tracts of the Pacific. Still it is from the writings of Edrisi, their greatest geographer, who, about 1150, was residing at the Court of the Norman Princes of Palermo, that we get the first account of a landfall made on the shores of the fabled Atlantis. The adventurers consisted of eight near relations, who, some time in the year 1100, provisioned a ship for several months, and sailed one fine morning from Lisbon, then an Arab town, into the pathless west. After eleven days they reached a brown and fetid sea. Turning south, they came to an island where sheep were feeding, but the bitterness of the mutton unfitted them for food. Continuing their voyage in the same direction for another twelve days, they light upon a city full of beautiful men and womHere, after a term of imprisonment, the ruler of the island put them blindfolded into a boat, and eventually they found themselves cast upon the coast of Africa, whence they made their way back to Lisbon, and gave their names to the street of "The Wanderers" in that city. en. Whether in the foregoing story we are entertained with a premature discovery of Madeira, the Canaries, or the Cape Verd Islands, or with a myth, nobody can now tell. While, however, the doctors and the divines of the Middle Ages persisted in regarding the earth as a plane surface, on the ground of such texts of Scripture as "Thou hast made all men to dwell on the 'face' of the earth," and denied its rotundity because the Psalmist says, "In his hands are all the corners' of the earth," or argued that "men at the supposed antipodes could not walk with their heads downward," and that ships could not sail, nor rain fall," upward," there existed all the time in the writings of Aristotle and of his heathen successors conceptions of the nature of the globe which came wonderfully near the truth. For instance, in his treatise on the heavens, Aristotle asserts that "the earth is not only round, but not so very large, and the sea which washes the shores outside the Pillars of Hercules, bathes also the neighboring coasts of India." Again, in another work, he says, "It is probable that at the side of the earth, opposite our own, there are other continents, some large, some small, bearing the same proportion to the Atlantic as our islands to the seas which surround them." Strabo, also, following Eratosthenes, observed that, if it were not for the intervening Atlantic, we could pass from Spain to India along the same parallel of latitude, and quotes Poseidonius as saying that one only wanted a good easterly wind to reach India. Seneca goes a step farther in the same direction, and enforces this conclusion in the following prophetic passage in his "Medea: ""There will come a time when ocean will unbar his gates, and, as Tethys lifts the veil, new continents will rise in view, nor will Thule be the limit of the world." Lastly, Macrobius, in his comment on the "Dream of Scipio," prophesies that if you go far enough west, you will reach the antipodes. Side by side with the conjectures of these serious men of science, dreams and fancies as to a blessed region bathed in golden sunshine, far down the foamfringed ridges of the Western Sea, were already floating about the world, even in pre-historic times. With Homer, it was the garden of the Hesperides, the abode of the noble dead, where there was neither snow nor winter-he had wellnigh added "where there are no more tears." With Solon and the early Greeks, if we are to believe Plato's lovely story, half myth, half allegory, and perhaps not wholly untrue, it was the island of Atlantis. Aristotle also speaks of a blissful island in the west discovered by the Carthaginians, as does Diodorus, who gives a vivid description of its fruits, its flowers, its singing birds, and crystal streams; and Plutarch asserts that Sertorius having been defeated both by land and by sea, had half a mind impertinence to present themselves before Prince Henry the Navigator to announce that they had just arrived from this blessed country, and that the descendants of its episcopal founders were anxious to know whether the Moors still reigned in Portugal. Though the Prince doubted, others believed, and a noble Portuguese, Ferdinand Ulmo, in 1487-that is to say, a year after the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope-entered into an agreement with the Government of Portugal, in a document which is still extant, to take possession of the "seven cities," on condition that they should be placed under the jurisdiction of himself and his heirs. Even Prince Henry was much preoccupied by a desire to reach the Court of Prester John, an elusive Arms of the Company of Merchant Venturers of Bristol, of which Cabot was Governor in 1553. to find consolation from his sorrows in certain far-away regions of which he had heard from some adventurous mariners just come back from them. With the advent of the Middle Ages, analogous traditions become rife, and take even a firmer hold upon the receptive imagination of the early Christian world. St. Brandan sails from Ireland in search of the earthly Paradise, and, with the assistance of a friendly giant, reaches, in midocean, an isle surrounded by shining walls of gold; and so authentic was this discovery considered, that the island of St. Brandan remained extant on the maps until the end of the sixteenth century. Thanks to Tennyson, we all know about the voyage of Maeldune and the enchanted archipelago he visited. Again, as soon as the Moors invade the Spanish Peninsula, seven bishops with their disciples sail forth upon the mare tenebrosum, and land on a beatific shore, where they build seven great cities. Many hundred years later a handful of ship-men have the Christian potentate ruling an impalpable Eastern realm, whose name was probably a corruption of the Persian "Ferishta-i-Jehán," i.e., Angel of the World, and not synonymous with Priest or Presbyter John, as is generally thought. In the same way, too, as the inhabitants of Kerry and Galway fancied that now and then they could descry, just before sunset, the glistening tops of the island of St. Brandan, so the people of the Canaries, as well as those of Madeira, were firmly convinced that, at what some conjectured to be a distance of one hundred leagues, and others fifty, they had seen on many a clear day the dim bastions of a faroff land, which, nevertheless, had always escaped their search as often as they had sailed in pursuit of it. Passing from the guesses after truth of the Old World philosophers, and the fantasies of the mediaval dreamers, we stand upon surer ground on reaching the unpromising realm of Thule, as Iceland still continued to be called. The first visitors to its inhospitable shores were undoubtedly some Irish anchorites; for the bells and crosses found by the early Norse emigrants bear witness to their whilom presence. It seems to have been re-discovered by a jarl of the Faroe Islands in 860, though the * See Mr. Beazley's "Life of Prince Henry the Navigator," an admirable book treating of this period, and illustrated by an interesting collection of medieval maps. Sebastian Cabot at about Eighty Years of Age. Reproduced from the engraving in Seyer's History of Bristol published in 1823. The original painting was attributed to Holbein and was destroyed by fire in 1845. Viking Raven Floke, with Ingolf and Leif, his fellow-islanders, are regarded as the founders of the colony. Ten years later Gunniborn sights Greenland, and calls it "White Shirt." But more than a century passes before the first settlement of Greenland is effected under the guidance of Eric the Red, who, with the genuine spirit of a "promoter," christens the country by the deceptive appellation it now bears, because, as he himself confesses, "it is a good name to attract emigrants." It has been contended that the designation Greenland VOL. XXII.-6 proves that in former days the climate was different from what it is at present, and that some accumulation of permanent ice on its eastern seaboard converted what were in those days verdant fields into their present icy aspect; but Dr. Nansen, whom we consulted on the point, does not subscribe to this opinion. There is no doubt, however, that for several hundred years the eastern shore of what we now call Davis Strait was the seat of several Icelandic settlements, for recent explorers have laid bare the ruins of houses, churches, and sepul |