which it would not be easy to surpass.  Above the village, reaching almost to the limits beyond which there is no cultivation, there stands a series of chapels like those I have been describing at Saas-Fee, only much larger and more ambitious.  They are twelve in number, including the church that crowns the series.  The figures they contain are of wood (so I was assured, but I did not go inside the chapels):  they are life-size, and in some chapels there are as many as a dozen figures.  I should think they belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and here, one would say, sculpture touches the ground; at least, it is not easy to see how cheap exaggeration can sink an art more deeply.  The only things that at all pleased me were a smiling donkey and an ecstatic cow in the Nativity chapel.  Those who are not allured by the prospect of seeing perhaps the very worst that can be done in its own line, need not be at the pains of climbing up to Vispertimenen.  Those, on the other hand, who may find this sufficient inducement will not be disappointed, and they will enjoy magnificent views of the Weisshorn and the mountains near the Dom.

I have already referred to the triptych at Gliss.  This is figured in Wolf’s work on Chamonix and the Canton Valais, but a larger and clearer reproduction of such an extraordinary work is greatly to be desired.  The small wooden statues above the triptych, as also those above its modern companion in the south transept, are not less admirable than the triptych itself.  I know of no other like work in wood, and have no clue whatever as to who the author can have been beyond the fact that the work is purely German and eminently Holbeinesque in character.

I was told of some chapels at Rarogne, five or six miles lower down the valley than Visp.  I examined them, and found they had been stripped of their figures.  The few that remained satisfied me that we have had no loss.  Above Brieg there are two other like series of chapels.  I examined the higher and more promising of the two, but found not one single figure left.  I was told by my driver that the other series, close to the Pont Napoleon on the Simplon road, had been also stripped of its figures, and, there being a heavy storm at the time, have taken his word for it that this was so.

Thought and Language {209}

Three well-known writers, Professor Max Muller, Professor Mivart, and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, have lately maintained that though the theory of descent with modification accounts for the development of all vegetable life, and of all animals lower than man, yet that man cannot—­not at least in respect of the whole of his nature—­be held to have descended from any animal lower than himself, inasmuch as none lower than man possesses even the germs of language.  Reason, it is contended—­more especially by Professor Max Muller in his Science of Thought, to which I propose confining our attention this evening—­is