vehicles in Great Tower Street, he shrank | that the Home at Battersea takes in cats back abashed and confounded. He saw and boards them on reasonable terms. the hopelessness of barking at them all, and seemed to feel that the delight of life was spoiled by too abundant opportunity. But the lot of the lost dog in London is no longer a hopeless one. Sooner or later he is pretty sure to fall into the hands of the police, to be conducted carefully to the Dogs' Home, where, if his master has taken the trouble to look for him, a joyful meeting may be expected. And the same charitable provision has been proposed and partly carried out for cats. In striking contrast to the noisy, barking, agitated crew on one side of the Home is the dignified quietude of poor pussy's seclusion. There are friendly cats who rub themselves against the wire netting and ask to be stroked, and sorrowful cats who sit silently by their untouched saucers of milk, and refuse to be comforted. But cats soon accustom themselves to new quarters, especially when they can't get out, and the general feeling among them is of contented resignation to the force of circumstances. Cats, however, do not often get lost on their own account. Except in early kittenhood they rarely go far astray, and they know the airy paths among the slates and chimney-pots even better than their owners do the numbered and labelled streets below. When a cat is lost generally some man is at the bottom of the mystery. In the country the gamekeeper is mostly the culprit; in London, apart from those prowling ruffians who make a market of poor pussy's skin, the pigeon fancier is chiefly to be feared. A popular manual on the subject of pigeons airily gives directions for making a cat-trap. It is to be baited with a pigeon's head, and when the cat is caught it can be dropped into a bag, and the bag - but we will draw a veil over pussy's fate; the subject is too harrowing for a true lover of cats. And yet there are many stray cats about London-homeless cats who may gradu. ally starve to death if not taken in by the charitable. It is not the cat which has abandoned its home, but the home itself that is shut up and abandoned probably, and thus the animal of all others the most home-loving is left to the miseries of slow starvation, which must be aggravated by the mocking cry of the cats'-meat man, once a signal of delight. Many people, too, when they leave town for their summer holiday, shut up their houses and leave poor puss to the mercy of the streets. There is no longer an excuse for this, now To a starving cat there must be something very aggravating in the bearing of the London sparrows. The sparrow's attitude is one of assured indifference; he hops jauntily about, almost within reach of Grimalkin's claws. Almost, but not quite. On the slightest movement on the part of the cat, the sparrow is away with a derisive twitter. Indeed, most cats of experience have given up the sparrow as a bad job, and take no notice of his vagaries. And it is rarely you see a fullgrown sparrow fall into trouble, though as spring advances and the nestlings begin to leave the nest and flutter about, the cats take their toll of the weakest and least active. The wonder is that the sparrows are allowed to build their nests and rear their young in peace. But that they do so is quite evident from the number of young sparrows that appear every season, al though it is rarely that one comes upon a house-sparrow's nest. Lucky are those birds who get permanent quarters within some roomy public building, such as Westminster Abbey, where there is generally a colony to be found, or St. Paul's, where their twitterings resound pleasantly in the huge dome. But while the sparrow within is a more or less unauthorized intruder, the colonies of pigeons which have established themselves outside, might, as far as ancient title is concerned, seem to have rights of possession more firmly founded than our own. From all antiquity, pigeons have hovered about the great buildings of great cities, and their cooings and flutterings have resounded in the Acropolis and the Capitol, as now in the quadrangle of Somerset House or about the façade of the British Museum. Seen in the broken light of a fine spring day, with massive clouds showing against the dusky blue, the broad frieze of the Museum portico is all alive with pigeons, which strut about the broad ledges or flut. ter in and out of the hollows and about the limbs of the sculptured figures; spreading out their tail-feathers, bowing and scraping, and ruffling up their iridescent necks in happy indifference to the world below; to the sight-seers who are saunter: ing up the broad steps, to the readers and students, who pass in and out with faces more or less lined and careworn. same scene is going on as far as the pigeons are concerned, where executors, with wills under their arms, are making their way to the probate offices, or sus. The From Chambers' Journal. BEE AND ANT PHENOMENA. picious relatives, unblessed with legacies, are going to search for themselves to see what that will of Uncle John's actually did VERY important and highly interesting amount to, in the stony quadrangle of discoveries have been lately made on this Somerset House, that is, where once grew subject, which enable us easily to account the lime grove planted by Queen Henriet- for hitherto unexplained phenomena in ta's father confessor. Equally preoccu- bee life. It is well known that the honey pied, too, are the doves that flutter about of our honey-bees when mixed with tincthe feet of her Majesty's faithful Com-ture of litmus acquires an unmistakable mons, and build among the pinnacles of the great palace of Westminster. The official pigeons, as these birds may be called, which devote themselves to the service of the crown, are very much of a feather; their plumage sombre and uniform, throwing back, as the dog-fancier would say, to the original "blue-rock" pigeon, the ancestor of all the tribe. Recruits from outside occasionally join the ranks, admitted by competitive examina. tion, probably -a stray carrier, perhaps, that has lost its way, or a widowed dove from some neighboring cote. There was a brown and white pigeon, the other day, on the Museum grass, which seemed to have found domestic joy among the bluerocks, and its progeny will show distinct markings for a while, which will disappear in the course of a few generations that is, if its progeny are allowed to survive for one has heard dark rumors on that subject apropos of the fact that these civilservice pigeons, although they certainly multiply, do not increase to any appreciable extent. As far as can be learnt, nobody feeds these pigeons. They pick up a living about cab stands, and share in crumbs and broken victuals with the sparrows. An interesting incident in pigeon annals was the dynamite explosion at Westminster, in consequence of which the inner quadrangle was closed to cabs, and there were no more pickings to be had from that quarter. But in this emergency it is pleasant to add that the birds found a friend in Inspector Denning, who caused daily rations to be issued till the opening of Parliament brought cabs and horses to the rescue. We may hope that in time other birds will become denizens of the gardens and open spaces that are now being provided for public use. When the trees on the Embankment attain a fair size, there seems no reason why birds should not build amongst their branches — that is, if the ever-destructive London rough can be eventually neutralized. And to hear the wild wood-note of some song-bird in passing along the Strand would be an experience worth living for. red tint, a fact no doubt owing to the subtilized formic acid it contains; the presence of which acid likewise imparts to the raw honey its power of keeping for a considerable length of time. Honey which has been clarified by means of water and exposure to heat the so-called sirup of honey-spoils more easily than the ordinary kind, because the formic acid in it has in a great measure been expelled. The honey of very fierce tribes of bees has a peculiarly acrid taste and pungent smell; this is due to the excess of formic acid contained in such honey. Till lately, complete ignorance prevailed as to the manner in which this so essential component of honey, formic acid, found its way into the substance secreted from the stomach or honey-bag of the busy workers; recent discoveries have, however, enlightened us on this point. These show us that the sting serves the bee not only as a means of defence, and sometimes of offence, but possesses likewise the almost more important power of infusing into the stored-up honey an antiseptic substance, not subject to fermentation. It has been lately observed that bees in hives, even when left undisturbed, from time to time rub off against the honeycomb, from the point of their sting, a tiny drop of bee poison; in other words, formic acid. This excellent preservative is thus little by little introduced into the honey. The more irritable and vicious the bees are, the greater the quantity of formic acid conveyed into the honey by them; a sufficient admixture of which is essential to the production of good honey. The praise, therefore, that has been so often lavished by adepts in such things on that indolent member of the bee tribe, the Ligurian bee, which hardly ever stings, is in point of fact misplaced. The observation just made above will explain, too, why the stingless honey-bee of South America collects but little honey; for it is notorious that when trees have been felled which have been inhabited by the stingless melipone, but little honey has been found in them. And indeed, what inducement have the bees to store up honey that will not keep, since it contains no formic acid? Of the eighteen different kinds of north- | destroys the preservative power of the Brazilian honey-bees known to the nat- formic acid; hence this drying process. uralist, only three possess a sting. We see, then, that the winter provision of honey for the bees, and the store of grain which serves as food for the ants, are preserved by means of one and the same fluid - namely, formic acid. The use of formic acid as a means of preserv ing fruit, and the like, was first suggested by Feierabend in the year 1877. From Longman's Magazine. THE MATCHMAKER'S EUCLID. Introduction. A very striking phenomenon in the habits of a certain species of ant is now amply accounted for. There exist, as is well known, various tribes of grain-collecting ants. The seeds of grasses and other plants remain stored up by them, often for years in their little granaries, without germinating. In India there is a very small red ant which drags into its cells grains of wheat and oats. But the creatures are so tiny, that, with their ut most efforts, it takes from eight to ten of them to carry off even one single grain. They move along in two separate rows, over smooth or rough ground, as the case may be, and even up and down stairs, in steady regular progression. They have often to traverse more than a thousand metres to carry their booty into the common storehouse. The celebrated naturalist Moggridge repeatedly observed that when the ants were prevented from reach ing their granaries, the seeds in the grana-versally understood, and as showing more ries began to sprout. The same thing happened in storehouses that had been abandoned by them. We must infer, then, that ants possess the means of suspending or arresting the action of germination without destroying or impairing the actual vitality of the grain, or without impairing the vital principle that lies latent in the grain. The famous English scientist, Sir John Lubbock, in his work entitled "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," relates these and similar facts, and adds that it was not yet known how the ants prevented their provision of grain from sprouting. But now it has been proved that this is due simply to the preservative power of the formic acid, the effect of which is so powerful that it can either arrest the process of germination, or destroy it altogether in the seed. THE art of match-making and eldest-son hunting having been long since reduced to a science by the mammas of fashion. able life, it has been thought desirable to embody the same in writing for the benefit of posterity; and in accomplishing this task the method of Euclid has been followed, both as one which will be uni clearly than any other the connection between the successive steps of the science. Definitions. I. An undesirable partner is one who has no town house, and whose income has no magnitude. 2. A doubtful partner is title without wealth. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The extremities of a ball-room are the A bad business is the plain inclination An obtuse angler is one who does not An acute angler is one who does hook an eldest son. A term of endearment is the extremity of a flirtation. We will further mention that there exists among us a kind of ant that lives on seeds and stores them up. This is our Lasius niger, which, according to the statement made by Wittmack at the meeting of amateur naturalists at Berlin, carries seeds of violets, and likewise of ground ivy (Veronica hedaraæfolia), into its cells. In his description of an Indian ant (Pheidole providens), Sykes relates that the above-mentioned kind collects large stores of grass-seeds. He notices likewise that after a monsoon storm, the ants bring their stores of grain out of their granaries, in order to dry them. It seems, therefore, that excessive moisture 10. A figure is that which is compressed 9. A blue stocking is a plain figure having one decided line which is called her erudition, and is such that when forming the centre of a circle all young men will be found equally distant from that centre. shall at length meet with such reprobation at the hands of the said angels as shall lead one to believe that they are not quite angels. PROPOSITION I. To secure an aristocratic partner by the help of a given (finite) number of charms. Let a talent for dancing A, and a pair of fine eyes B, be the given finite number of charms. Let D be the aristocratic partner. It is required to secure D with AB. B to bear on an old gentleman C, Then with your captive D, and to the tune of the last waltz out, describe the circle of the room, and if at any point of the dance you meet the gentleman G, to whom you are really engaged, consoling himself with a new partner H, let that be the point when the dancers cut one another. ACCORDING to the San Francisco Courier | such that they toss about the largest vessels the great glacier of Alaska is moving at the rate of a quarter of a mile per annum. The front presents a wall of ice five hundred feet in thickness; its breadth varies from three to ten miles, and its length is about one hundred and fifty miles. Almost every quarter of an hour hundreds of tons of ice in large blocks fall into the sea, which they agitate in the most violent manner. Tire waves are said to be which approach the glacier as if they were small boats. The ice is extremely pure and dazzling to the eye; it has tints of the lightest blue as well as of the deepest indigo. The top is very rough and broken, forming small hills, and even chains of mountains in miniature. This immense mass of ice, said to be more than an average of a thousand feet thick, advances daily towards the sea. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. 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