Notes On Literature, Science, And Art.

painting , now hung at the Birthplace , differs from the original picture . The rejection of this picture seems singular , Avhen there Avere exhibited so many draAvings and paintings of other subjects . " Now that Ave have proper medical men appointed throughout the country as paid officers of health , it strikes me forcibly that Ave might utilise their services much more than AA'e are doing ,, in gleaning a mass of useful information on the immutable laws of nature bearing on the health both of the human race and of our domestic animals ; as

their careful reports ( which shoidd be required periodically and their authors properly remunerated , the whole analysed , arranged , and systematically condensed by competent philosophers ) Avould gradually produce very important results . Take , for example , the bearings of electricity in the atmosphere on the health of the body , and through the body on the mind . The most uneducated must have noticed the difference on their own

nervous S 3 'stem before and after a thunderstorm ; and its effects on lmlk and on beer have long been proverbial . May not the clouds be in some measure compared to Leyden jars ? It is said that when that dreadful disease , Asiatic Cholera , was doing its most direful ivork in this country , there was a great absence of electricity in the ah ' Ave breathe , ancl in the condition of which AA'e all of us have an immense interest in keeping pure and abundantly supplied to rich and poor . I fuave no Avish to make electricity everything in relation to healthbut of its i r ast importance there can be no

, doubt iu the mind of anyone ivho has eA'er thought at all on the subject . I believe that diarrhoea , hooping-cough , scarlatina , small-pox , typhoid fwer , ancl many other diseases are strongest in the human frame as a ride when electricity in the atmosphere is the weakest . Then again , the peculiar manner in AA'hich the germs of disease are spread among the human family is a subject on Avhich the Avisest of us have much to learn . I have knoAvn a disease called infectious attack a family in an isolated dAvelling on a hill ,

none of whom ivere knoivn to have been Ai'ithin a dozen miles of any person suffering from such an illness . Mi ght not the germs of that disease have been borne on the breeze , breathed in , and germinated , where there AA'as a predisposition for illness in the person Avho had retained it , whilst a more robust constitution might have thrown it out again iu respiration along AA'ith the carbonic acid gas generated in the capillary fires ? Doctors often half poison then patients and those about them with stinking chloride of

lime , or ivith carbolic acid , but rarely recommend that most pleasant and efficacious of all disinfectants , Condy ' s Fluid—the permanganate of potass—nor are they sufficiently careful to instruct the nurses about their patients in the absolute necessity of disinfecting the filth thrown off from the boivels , skin , etc . ; poisons Avhich , I believe , may be borne on the air and sow their germs in the life-blood of people many miles off . We have yet much to learn , Avith all our boasted " march of intellect ; " and the more I study the sanitary laivs given to the children of Israel in the Volume of the Sacred Laiv , the more I am struck Avith their Aidse adaptability , under the circumstances , to the people to whom they ivere given .

Writing of Puget Sound— " that deep landlocked bay which stretches so far into the north shore of Washington territory "—Major W . F . Butler , C . B ., says : " The tide in the Sound rises hi gh and ebbs IOAV . At some of the stopping-places it was curious to ivatch the antics of certain croivs , Avhose livelihood was gained from the rocks left bare by the IOAV water . Around the base of the wooden piles upon which the landing-stages AA'ere built mussels thickl y clustered ; detaching these with their bills , the

crows Avoidd ascend some thirty or forty yards into the air , then dropping the shell-fish on to the rock , they would swoop after it to catch the fish detached b y the fall from the shattered shell . " Tins reminds one of the fine old legend that has come CIOAVU to us of the death of the Greek dramatist , iEschylus , 456 , B . C . Sitting bareheaded in a field , an eagle flying over him with a tortoise in its bill , ancl taking his . bald head for a stons , let fall its preyto break the shelland so crushed in the poor old poet ' s brain- that

, , pan he died on the spot . The legend , like the generality of such , may be taken for what it is ivorth ; Romance has its own world as well , as Fact ; but Major Butler ' s croivs dropping their mussels to smash the shells is so far in favour of eagles dropping their tortoises too , though one hopes their penetrating eyes never mistake the bald heads of