never dreamed of changing. One of the conditions was, and is, that her patroness shall provide a husband for her. Often enough, also, the child of such a protégée succeeds to her place when old enough, and thus very pleasing relations are established between families of different status. . . . The practice of adopting girl-children to train as servants becomes more and more common as slaves become scarcer. . . . A class of domestic servants is being formed which, in due time, will replace the slaves. But transformations of the sort are very, very slow in the East. Meanwhile the process is very disagreeable, even shocking, to Moslem housewives, and it is not at all surprising that they should pay heavily and run some risk to obtain a negro who is all their own."
Lake Beaches.—In his discussion of the beaches and their correlative moraines of Lake Erie, in the American Journal of Science, Mr. Frank Leverett shows that the belief of geologists now is that the phenomena do not demand a submergence of the land during the closing stages of the Glacial epoch; that, instead of a depression, there was a greater altitude than in the earlier part of the period; and that the result of investigation has been to reduce the noteworthy lakes connected with the closing stages of glaciation in Ohio to the one bounded by the beach lines that were recognized by the Ohio Geological Survey. The examination of the phenomena in detail leads to the conclusion that Lake Erie, in its earlier stages, was but a small body of water, its size being conditioned by the position of the retreating ice-sheet and by the height of the western rim of the basin it occupied.
The arrangements for the meeting of the American Association, to be held in Rochester, N. Y., in August, are nearly completed. The meeting will be opened on Tuesday evening, the 17th, with an address by Secretary F. W. Putnam. President Joseph Le Conte will deliver an address on Wednesday evening, the 18th; a reception will be given the Association by the ladies of the city at the Powers Art Gallery on Thursday, the 19th; and a public lecture will be given on Friday evening. The business meetings will be held in the university. The Saturday excursions will include visits to Niagara Falls, Portage, Mount Morris, Canandaigua Lake, and Watkins Glen, and the long excursion will be to the Adirondack region.
The second annual session of the School of Applied Ethics will be held at Plymouth, Mass., July 6th to August 17th. The programme of instruction includes six courses of five lectures each in the History of Religions; seven courses in Economics; and a series of fifteen lectures by Prof. William Wallace, of Oxford, on Variations of the Moral Standard, illustrated by the History of Ethical Theories; with four other courses in Ethics. Applications may be made to the secretary, S. Burns Weston, 118 South 12th Street, Philadelphia,
In Uruguay, according to Admiral Kennedy, of H. M. S. Ruby, barbed wire has played a part in suppressing revolutions, as it is not easy to march troops over a country intersected by it.
A Postschule is to be established at Leipsic for the special training of post-office assistants, and eventually also of postmasters. The course of instruction will embrace, besides the usual branches, the subjects belonging to the postal service.
According to Dr. R. W. Shufeldt's observations of the Navajo belt-weavers, curves are never found in the figure-patterns on the belts or blankets, but horizontal stripes, diagonals, and the lozenge are interwoven with a variety that appears to be almost endless in the matter of design. The leading colors used are red, brilliant orange-yellow, a blue, and by combination a green, and black, white and gray.
The results of the observations of Mr. H. C. Russell, of Sydney, on the Grouping of Stars in the Southern Part of the Milky Way were described by him at the Australasian Association as tending to diminish the value of the rifts in the discussion of stellar distribution.
The detailed meteorological observations, made under the direction of H. B. de Saussure simultaneously on the Col du Geant, at Geneva, and at Chamounix, in July, 1788, have been published in the memoirs of the Physical Society of Geneva. Only the means of a part of the observations were published by De Saussure in his Voyages dans les Alpes.
The nest and egg of a bird-of-paradise have been found by two Australian gentlemen on an island off the coast of Queensland, and have been described by Mr. A. J. Campbell in the Victoria Field Naturalists' Club. The hen was watched till she flew into the crown of a pandanus tree, where her head could be seen as she sat on her nest.
