CURRENT NOTES.
With the January number of Lippincott's Magazine a change will be made in the character of the Monthly Gossip. It will henceforth become an editorial department in which information will be volunteered upon any literary, scientific, or miscellaneous topic of general interest, and queries on such topics will be answered. Queries from all sources are invited, and every effort will be made to answer them fully and entertainingly. But it is requested that all correspond will refrain from sending queries to which sufficient answers may already be found in such familiar books of reference as Brewer's "Keader's Handbook," Brewer's "Phrase and Fable," Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Wheeler's "Noted Names of Fiction," Lippincott's "Biographical Dictionary," Chambers's and other Encyclopædias, Classical Dictionaries, etc. All queries received before the 24th of November will be answered in the January number, and so on.
About ten years ago Pyle's Pearline first came to the relief of overworked women. It had many prejudices to live down; but to-day it stands prominently among the American labor-saving inventions. Many millions of packages of pearline are consumed annually by an economical class of women who have found by experience that it will do all that is claimed for it. Our readers will do well to give this article a fair trial.
Horsford's Acid Phosphate Gives Satisfaction.—Dr. S. Nichols, Bellows Falls, Vermont, says, "I have used it, and it gives good satisfaction."
Among the most important literary events of the season is the arrangement by the Messrs. W. & E. Chambers, of Edinburgh, and J. B. Lippincott Company, of Philadelphia, for the issue of a new edition of the well-known Chambers's Encyclopedia. The work is to be thoroughly revised, entirely rewritten. and printed from new stereotyped plates. Active collaborators in both countries are busily engaged on the revision, and the first volume is announced for publication early next spring. The work will be copyrighted in both countries, and the publishers express their intention of making it a thoroughly international encyclopædia.
Horsford's Acid Phosphate in Nervous Dyspepsia.—Dr. R. McCombs, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says, "I have used it in nervous dyspepsia with success. It is a good nervous tonic."
Many queries have from time to time been made in regard to the origin of the familiar saying "Pouring oil on the troubled waters." While no answer has been entirely satisfactory, the following, so far as known, is the oldest historical reference to the use of oil for the purpose of allaying storms at sea. The Venerable Bede in his "Ecclesiastical History" (781 a.d.) tells of a priest called Vtta who was sent into Kent to fetch Eanflede, King Edwine's daughter, who
