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280 a fit type of honesty, for it regards the property of its neighbors, and will not rob. Once, it is said, when an ant dropped a grain of corn, a number of other ants came up and smelled of it, but let it lie till the owner came up and took it away. Simon ben Chalafta, "the Experimenter," tells of an experiment worthy of Lubbock. On a very hot day he put a cover over an ant-hill. A sentry ant came out, observed the shadow, and reported upon it to his fellows. They came out to enjoy the coolness of the shade, when it was suddenly taken away, and the insects, irritated by the burning sun, fell upon the scout that had led them into the trap, and killed him. The Agadists make much of the devotion of the individual ant to the welfare of the whole colony as a salient point of formic character. Dr. Placzek suggests that Solomon may have been acquainted with a kind of agricultural ants from his sentence, "Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest," where the former verb may, in analogy with other cases of its use in the Bible, refer to the preparation of the field. Passages are quoted that point to the thought that the difference in mental gifts between men and animals is only quantitative. In one of the books, a limit is set to the scope of scientific investigation thus: "What is too high for thee, seek not to reach; what is too hard for thee, seek not to penetrate; what is incomprehensible to thee, try not to know; what remains hidden from thy mind, strive not to discover. Direct thy thought only to what is attainable, and trouble thyself not about hidden things."

Geological Catastrophes.—The Duke of Argyll, in his address to the Edinburgh Geological Society, on its fiftieth anniversary, took the ground that "nothing can be more unphilosophical than the antithesis and opposition which is set up between what is called the law of continuity and what is called the doctrine of catastrophes. Throughout all Nature, and throughout all those operations of the human intellect which depend on the manipulation of natural forces, we see the two doctrines to be perfectly harmonious—strains and tensions maintaining themselves in absolute silence up to the bending or the breaking-point—pressures pressing with tremendous but noiseless energy up to the bursting point—and then moments of rapid and sometimes of instantaneous change. If it is irrational to quote the continuity of Nature as affording any, even the least, presumption against sudden and great effects, it is still more irrational to quote it as irreconcilable with effects which, though catastrophes to us, whose scales of measurement are often the scales of pygmies, are in reality nothing but movements of infinitesimal smallness in the scale of Nature. I had occasion the other day, in delivering a popular lecture in Glasgow, to exhibit a section of the globe drawn to the scale of one tenth of an inch to a mile. On that scale, which I have taken from my friend Mr. James Nasmyth, the globe is represented by a circle sixty-four feet in diameter, and I was able to show that on that portion of the curve which represents one eighth of the circumference, the elevation of the highest mountain in Europe, Mont Blanc, was wholly invisible to the spectators who were half-way down the hall, and could barely be seen even by those who were close at hand. The truth is, that, when we come to realize the almost infinitesimal smallness of the irregularities of the earth's surface as compared with its circumference—the whole range from the highest height to the deepest deep being somewhat less than sixty thousand feet—the wonder comes to be that if subterranean forces are at work at all in modifying, from time to time, the perfect smoothness and sphericity of the surface, not that their work should be so great, but, on the contrary, that it should be so very small."

Causes of Typhoid Fever.—In a paper published by the Iowa State Board of Health on the nature, causes, and prevention of the typhoid fever of America, Dr. R. J. Farquharson. Secretary of the Board, emphasizes the distinction between typhus and typhoid, an important point of which is, he believes, that typhoid is not contagious. A number of reports, American and foreign, seem to concur in fixing the origin of the disease in some condition of the ground or water, and indicate that it may be produced by foul water, by foul air, or by emanations from