from the tribes of the northwest, and many carvings obtained from the Eskimos. Dr. C. C. Abbott has presented a quantity of material obtained from the site of an old Dutch trading house on the Delaware, which tells the story of the early contact of the white race with the Indians. Mr. Valk explored during the year an ancient village site and burial place in the Delaware Valley, where interesting discoveries were made relating to the early inhabitants. In his examination of the singular and ancient burial places on the coast of Maine, Mr. Willoughby has ascertained several important facts, and has obtained many interesting objects, some of which show Eskimo affinities. Mr. George Byron Gordon has undertaken the exploration of Copan under a concession from the Government of Honduras. More money is needed for this work, and other institutions are invited to cooperate in it. The collection already in the museum is pronounced to be of remarkable interest and not equaled elsewhere, but is so crowded and unprotected that it is not open except under special arrangement. The course of general anthropology was attended by nine pupils.
The Passing of Torture.—Asiatic peoples tolerate torture, practice it, almost seem to like it (the infliction of it, that is); European nations do not now permit it. The difference presents a problem in the development of human character. Europeans did not always abhor torture; they have changed since the Romans delighted in gladiatorial shows and in seeing captives and Christians thrown into the arena to be devoured by wild beasts. Aversion to torture can hardly be called a characteristic of Christians, although it is inculcated in the Christian code, and may have been developed under Christian teachings. King Menelek of Abyssinia, who is said to have recently condemned a treacherous page to terrible sufferings by mutilations and exposure in the wilderness, calls himself a Christian. The Inquisition was in full blast under the ægis of the Church only two or three centuries ago, and autos da fé were festivals in Madrid down to 1750. Prisoners convicted of certain crimes were broken on the wheel only a bare hundred years ago in France. Torture was legal in Denmark within living men's memories, and is still practiced, though not authorized, in Russian prisons. And what are we to say to the punishments still sometimes inflicted upon offending negroes in the southwest? But these things have passed away, and only a few vestiges of them, like the last mentioned, remain among any men of European lineage, while the world at large abhors the recital of them. Having shown a number of other special causes the validity of which, he considers, can not be depended upon to account wholly for the change, a writer in the London Spectator assumes that "there must be some separate moral impulse which has arisen apart, or in a certain degree apart, from any teaching of the creeds; and we find it difficult not to believe that it is a new impulse, that man's moral nature has on this side made in Europe a distinct stride forward. It is an advance the extent and depth of which have not yet been tested, for the masses of Europe have not of late years been provoked to furious anger, as they once were, by heresies and treasons, or as they may be, by and by, by anarchist explosions; but it is an advance which it is impossible not to recognize, and one that has gone far down, reaching classes whom the spirit of practical Christianity has hardly touched. If that is true, it is the most hopeful thought suggested by any of the social phenomena around us; and after much observation, continued for many years, the present writer can hardly doubt that it is true."
Oysters and Disease.—In view of what has been said of the possibility of the communication of disease by eating raw oysters, inquiries have been instituted by the English Local Government Board into the circumstances under which the cultivation and storage of shellfish along the coast are carried on. As a result of his bacteriological investigation of water from an oyster bed and of oysters from the same source, Prof. Cruikshank, of King's College, London, reports that he found a considerable number of bacteria in the sea water, but very few in the liquid of the oyster, in which the increase of bacteria was also very slow, but that in both cases the bacteria were familiar and harmless species, and there was no septic odor. Hence he finds no evidence that would lead him to condemn the oysters as
