articles in the "Gartenlaube," that the Americans are tending toward the Indian type, and that he has observed the resemblance not only in the face and form, but also in the gestures and movements. A. Mühry, in his work on "Climatology," says that the evaporation is nearly twice as great at New York as at Whitehaven, England, hence the Americans and English live under very different conditions, and exhibit great divergences of temperament. Dr. Carl Reclam, editor of "Die Gesundheit," compares the air of America and its effects to those of heights, where the lightness and dryness favor extraordinarily the evaporation or exhalation from the body, and notices in the Americans not only the characteristic physical features induced by such an air, but also "mental peculiarities, traces of which may be seen with us (Europeans) by a careful observer during a dry northeast wind." Mr. Young gives as the result of his own observations, that "the dry air with us produces nervous, energetic, large-jointed skeletons, which have little or nothing in common with the stout, fresh, rosy, phlegmatic inhabitants of the mother-country. Not only is the physical resemblance lost in the second generation, but the mental also, and ideas especially Britannic give way to ideas peculiarly American, the product of the climate, the soil, and the habits caused by these two factors." With the English the muscular system predominates; with the Americans, the nervous. American women possess beauty of face, almost never of form; and even the beauty of face is soon worn out by the drying, irritating effects of the climate and of American life. English women have beauty of form and face, and keep both to an advanced age.
The Jablochkoff Electric Light in London.—The London Metropolitan Board of Works has recently renewed a contract for one year for lighting the Victoria Embankment and Waterloo Bridge with the Jablochkoff electric light. The Jablochkoff system has been in successful operation on the Thames Embankment since the 13th of December, 1878, when twenty lights were started between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges. Twenty lights, extending the work to Blackfriars Bridge, were added in May, 1879, and ten more were put on Waterloo Bridge in October last; ten lights have also been placed in the Victoria Railway station. All of the lights on the Embankment have been kept in operation regularly for six hours each night since they were first started—a fact that is worthy of consideration when it is borne in mind that the machinery was originally arranged for twenty lights only, with no thought that the system was to be extended, and that the changes rendered necessary by each of the two extensions have had to be made without interfering with the daily efficiency of the apparatus. The price paid by the Board of Works was, at first, 6d. per light per hour; it was reduced to 5d. in the first, and 3d. on the second extension, and has again been reduced on the renewal of the contract to 212d. per light per hour. The Jablochkoff system of electric lighting is now in use under almost every possible condition and in every variety of establishment—in streets, on bridges, in railway stations, theatres, circuses, engineering and industrial works, docks, basins, on board steam-vessels, in hotels, and in private residences. King Theebaw, of Burmah, has sixty lights fitted up in his palace at Mandalay; the Shah of Persia four, at Teheran; Prince Agaklam six, at Bombay; and the King of Portugal and the ex-Queen of Spain are also using them. At present, seventeen hundred and sixteen are in use in different countries, one hundred and ninety-eight being in England.
Coloring of the Waters in Seas and Lakes.—Geographers were not able to determine why the Red Sea was so named until Ehrenberg, sailing over a part of it, observed that the water of the whole Gulf of Tor was colored a blood-red. Drawing up some of the water and examining it with the microscope, he found that the color was due, to a minute, thread-like, dark-red oscillatoria, or alga. The same alga was observed by Dupont twenty years afterward, giving rise to the same appearance over an extent of 256 nautical miles. A similar plant was noticed by Darwin in his voyage round the world, coloring the water near the Abrolhos Islands, off the coast of Brazil. Oersted, in 1845, noticed that the
