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celebrity, says La Nature. She passed her whole life in the cradle where she slept her first sleep, twenty-eight years ago. Up to the day of her death, this strange creature preserved the height and general appearance of an infant of a few months; but, wonderful to say, her intellect was normally developed and nothing could have been odder than to hear this tiny baby in the cradle talk like an adult, with much vivacity and intelligence! Maria was born in 1875, at Brigittenan, near Vienna. Her parents were of normal development, and so were her brothers and sisters. (Text.)

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DEGENERACY

Before Lord Shaftesbury began his work among the poor of England, he tells us that he witnessed this occurrence:

I must have been fourteen years old, or a little more, and I was walking down from the churchyard, just as we are to-day, when I was startled by hearing a sudden yell, a drunken voice singing, and a noisy sound of laughter coming up from the main road below; then they turned the corner, and I saw four men staggering along under a coffin, and jesting with song and horrible laughter as they drew near me. I looked at the coffin. I could see the rough boards were hastily nailed together; great cracks half revealed what was inside. Just as they passed me one of the men slipt, and the coffin fell from their shoulders and rolled over into the road. It was horrifying to me; and then they began to swear at one another, using foul language. I thought they would have fought over the poor dead creature's corpse. I came away feeling that if God preserved my life I would do something to help the poor and him that had no friend.

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Perhaps too much attention is being paid to various theories concerning evolution and development. It might be well sometimes to devote at least a little consideration to the serious possibilities of devolution and degeneracy.

Dr. Carpenter, a London zoologist, speaks thus of certain organisms brought to light by the scientific Atlantic dredging expedition: "This little organism is clearly a dwarfed and deformed representative of the highly developed Apiocrinus of the Bradford clay, which, as my friend Wyville Thomson said, seems to have been going to the bad for millions of years." Thus we learn that a lowly creature living on the ocean floor is the degenerate result of that which has been going to the bad for millions of years.

But if such a vast course of degradation is possible in a sea-worm, what are the possibilities of degradation in a soul?

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See ; ;.

Degeneracy a Figment—See.

DEGENERACY THROUGH DISUSE

It is a recognized fact that the disuse of faculties inevitably leads to deterioration.

There is a curious little plant called the sundew which grows in marshes. A small fly alights on one of the leaves attracted by the crimson hairs, and by the sticky liquid called the "dew." When the fly struggles to get free the hairs slowly curve round him and trap him, at the same time pouring out more of the dew. Presently the poor insect dies in that trap. Why does the plant do this? Simply because it wants to eat the fly. The dew is acid and dissolves the insect's body, so that the plant can absorb the nitrogen which it contains. The sundew once lived in harmless plant fashion, for it belongs to the saxifrage family, of which the other members are quite respectable and hard-working plants, getting their living by honest root-work in extracting their nitrogen out of the ground. When we examine the sundew we find it has scarcely anything worthy the name of a root. Long ago it seemed to dislike the wear and tear of thrusting rootlets into the ground and seeking for food, so it settled into a bog, where it could get water at least without any trouble. There, as the roots had next to nothing to do, they slowly dwindled away, as all things will dwindle which are not used, whether they be plant-roots, or the limbs of animals, or the minds of men.—"A Mountain Path."

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DEGRADATION

A doctor was once riding from Yezd to Kerman, in Persia, to make a visit. Arriving at a post-house, and finding no horse,