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asylums, because there will be no sane persons left to lock up the crazy ones. He takes the average in crease of insanity during the past forty years, as the basis of his calculation.
A single stone 115 feet long, 10 feet square at one end and 4 feet square at the other, has been success fully cut from the sandstone quarries at Houghton Point, Wisconsin It is supposed to be the longest monolith ever quarried. No sooner was La Fronde started in Paris with women for eompositors and printers, than the gov ernment interfered with it for violating the law pro hibiting night work for girls, recently passed at the instance of the advocates of woman's rights.
LITERARY NOTES. The April McClure's contains a series of heroic stories of the Gordon Highlanders, whose gallant as sault at Dargai last autumn sent their fame ringing round the earth. Hamlin Garland has written for this number " A Romance of Wall Street." It is the true story of the Grant and Ward failure. Herbert E. Hamblen relates his autobiography as a passenger engineer, telling of collisions with excursion trains and encounters with train robbers.
Current Literature for April has its usual quota of clever editorials, and full departments of se lected matter, prose and verse. The first article in the magazine is an able editorial on " Our Relations with Spain." Other interesting original articles (among them an exposure of certain recently dis covered cases of plagiarism) are followed by the usual departments. A timely Lenteri selection, en titled " Legends of the Crucifixion," is taken from H. A. Guerber's book, " Legends of the Virgin and Christ," and a charming little story of Andre Theuriet's, translated for Current Literature, appears in this number.
The April Scribner's is a Spring number, with a beautiful cover in eight colors. It contains the first part of Richard Harding Davis's short serial " The King's Jackal." This is the dramatic tale of an exiled king, and the action takes place at Tangier in the space of thirty-six hours. Appropriate to the Easter season is Henry van Dyke's long narra tive poem "The Toiling of Felix"— a legend woven
around a new saying of the Christ, " Raise the stone and thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood, and there am I." The fiction comprises a Canadian wilderness tale, "A Legend of Welly Legrave," and "Jim Cheney, Politician," a story of " practical " politics in the West, by a new writer, William R. Lighton. Brander Matthews writes of the " Conventions of the Drama." In the department entitled " The Progress of the World " the editor of the American Monthly Re view of Reviews, in the March number, reviews the De Lome incident, the Maine disaster, the Zola trial, and other important developments of the month at home and abroad. There is also in this. editorial summary an interesting discussion of the changed position of the Republican party on the money ques tion. There are also three important interviews con cerning the anti-Jewish crusade in France. The first, with M. Drumont, the head and front of the anti-Se mitic agitation in France, is reported by Valerian Gribayedoff; Robert H. Sherard reports conversa tions with Dr. Max Nordau, the author of " Degene ration," and with M. Zola; these, of course, give the Jews' side of the story.
An attractively illustrated article describing a spring visit to Nassau appears in the April number of Appleton's Popular Science Monthly. There is also a very interesting paper on the curious migra tory habits of birds and fishes, by W. K. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University. Among other articles are "The Electric Transmission of Water Power" by William Baxter, Jr.; " The Question of Wheat" by Worthington C. Ford; "An Industrial Object Lesson" by S. N. D. North, and "Evolution and Theology " by Rev. J. A. Zahm.
Harper's Magazine for April contains " How to Cycle in Europe " by Joseph Pennell; " The Closing Scene at Appomattox," by General George A. Forsyth, U.S.A.; " An Island City," by Thomas R. Dawley, Jr., describing a visit to an unexplored city in Central America. "Commercial Aspects of the Panama Canal," by Worthington C. Ford; " Photographing a Wounded African Buffalo," by ArtherC. Humbert; "England and Germany," by Sidney Whitman, F.R.G.S.; " Some Byways of the Brain," by Andrew Wilson, M.D.; "The Essentials at Fort Adobe," by Frederic Remington; "Wanted — An American Aldershot," by Captain James Parker, U.S.A. The fiction comprises, " The Promises of Dorothea," by Margaret Deland; " Primordial," by Morgan Robert
