same weight, were used a year under precisely similar conditions, being placed in the same soups, sauces, sour salads, etc., and exposed alike to hot, acid, and alkaline solutions, and subjected to similar methods of cleaning. The aluminium turned to a dead bluish-gray color, and lost its lustre; the German-silver changed to a grayish—yellow; the silver lost only in color, retaining its lustre. Weighed at the end of the year, the silver spoon had lost 0.403 per cent., the aluminium spoon 0.630 per cent., and the German-silver spoon 1.006 per cent. For small coins. Dr. Winkler thinks that aluminium is to be preferred to either nickel or silver alloys.
Is Insanity on the Increase?—Do the conditions of human life, as they exist in modern civilized countries, tend to an increase of insanity? A glance at the statistics of the insane for any given country would seem to require an affirmative answer to this question. For instance, the ratio of insane persons in England in the year 1859 was 18.67 to 100,000 persons; in 1865 it was 21. 73; in 1870, 24.31; in 1876, 26.78. In other words, there is now one insane person to 375 of the population, while in 1859 the proportion was about one in 540. But, as is shown by Dr. Henry Maudsley, in the Journal of Mental Science, the increase is apparent only: more insane persons are registered now than formerly. Again, the establishment of numerous asylums, and the better care bestowed on patients, have had the effect of prolonging the lives of the insane; this, too, will in part account for the higher proportion of insane shown by the statistics. The question is incidentally raised by Dr. Maudsley, whether we cure more insane persons nowadays, when we treat them well, than our uninstructed forefathers cured when they treated them ill. "There is," he replies, "no evidence that we do." Here the statistics would seem to show that, under the old system, there was a higher percentage of recoveries. "Yet, it would be wrong," remarks the author, "to attribute the lower percentage of recoveries to the ill-success of our present mode of dealing with insanity; it is, no doubt, owing in great part, if not entirely, to the greater proportion of chronic and incurable cases among those who have been admitted during the last twenty-five years. Formerly, acute and violent cases only were sent to asylums, and they would yield a larger percentage of recoveries, as well, probably, as a larger percentage of deaths. Of the admissions fewer recover and fewer die each year now than then, the result being the steady accumulation of a residue of chronic and incurable insanity beyond what occurred then. It is a question," he adds, "deserving attention, whether the present practice of crowding the insane of all sorts into large asylums, where the interests of life are extinguished, and where anything like individual treatment is wellnigh impracticable, is so much superior to the old system in effecting recoveries as some persons imagine."
The Rocky-Mountain Locust in Manitoba.—The following notes on the appearance and migration of the locust in Manitoba and the Northwest in the summer of 1875 are taken from a notice, in the American Journal of Science, of a paper on that subject by George M. Dawson. In the year just mentioned the hatching of locusts began in Manitoba on May 7th, and on May 15th it was general. The movement began in July, and was most general during the latter half of that month and the early part of August. The direction was southeast or south. Other swarms of locusts came from the south across the forty-ninth parallel, with a wide front stretching from the ninety-eighth to the one-hundred-and-eighth meridian; these arrived before the Manitoba broods were mature. These were the extreme northern part of the army, going northward and northwestward from the States ravaged in the fall of 1874. Mr. Dawson thinks that the planting of belts of woodland would in time effect a general and permanent abatement of the grasshopper-plague, since they usually avoid such belts. Their journey southward was regardless of the direction from which their parents had come the preceding year; and those of Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, flew northward and northwestward, returning on the course of their parents, who had flown southeastward from that quarter. The normal direction of flight is
