PARTS of Holland are from ten to thirty feet below the level of the sea. LORD LEIGHTON'S house in London has been offered by his sisters to the British nation on condition that it be preserved as it is. THREE women who we re recently admitted to the bar in New York city have been appointed receivers. This is the first instance of such an appointment in New York city. SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL'S system of identifying persons by their thumb-marks has been introduced experimentally into Bengal. The chief measure ap pears to be to identify Government pensioners and to make it impossible for anyone else to impersonate them. IT is said that Mrs. Humphrey Ward rewrote "Sir George Tressady" four times before it appeared as a serial, and twice more before she allowed it toappear in book form. It is also stated that ten thousand dol lars is her price for serial rights in England alone.
THOUGH the Cook Islands of the Southern Pacific have been annexed to the British Empire but eight years, the Federal Council has already passed a bill to keep out persons of bad character, drunken habits and unsound mind.
DENMARK, it is said, has an entente with Russia, which places Copenhagen, with all of Denmark's available forces, under Russian command in case of a war. In return Denmark is to be kept intact, and Schleswig is to be returned to her as soon as possible. Germany has been fearing such a treaty, and, to be on the safe side, built the Baltic North Sea Canal and added largely to her North Sea squadron.
AN experiment was recently made at an Austrian wood-pulp factory, to determine how quickly it was possible to make a newspaper from a tree. Three trees were felled in the presence of a notary and witnesses at 7.35 A.M. The trees were then taken to the factory and cut up into short pieces, which were stripped of their bark and converted into me chanical pulp. This was placed in a vat and mixed with the material necessary to form paper, and the first leaf of paper came out at 9.34 A.M. Some of the sheets of paper were taken, the notary still
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watching the proceedings, to the printing-office, about three miles away. The printed newspaper was issued at ten o'clock. Thus it took two hours and twentyfive minutes to convert a tree into a newspaper.
LITERARY NOTES. THE value of THE LIVING AGE, this old eclectic weekly, to every American reader, as the freshest and best compilation of gleanings from the field of British periodical literature, has been long recognized. With a desire to give the best the -world can offer, the publishers have arranged for the introduction of certain " New Features," so widening its scope as to embrace translations of noteworthy articles from the leading publications of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and other continental countries. In addition a monthly Supplement will be given, containing three departments devoted to American literature, viz. : Readings from American Magazines, Readings from New Books, and a List of the Books of the Month. THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY promises for 1897 a new story by Charles Egbert Craddock, called •• The Juggler." Lafcadio Hearn will contribute several papers on oriental countries, with which he is so familiar. T. W. Higginson will contribute a series of personal recollections entitled "Cheerful Yester days." There will be a series of articles bearing on the various educational movements of the day. There will also be series of articles on Surveys of the igth Century, Present-Day Problems, and New American Writers. THE year 1897 will be a Red Letter Year in the history of SCRIBNEK'S MAGAZINE. The publishers offer, among other good things, " London as seen by Charles Dana Gibson," •• Soldiers of Fortune," by Richard Harding Davis, and series of articles on the " Conduct of Great Businesses," and " Under graduate Life in American Colleges." Mrs. Helen Watterson Moody will contribute three or four ar ticles on woman, entitled "The Unquiet Sex." W. D. Howells, Geo. W. Cable, and others, will con tribute articles for the lighter portion of the maga-
IN the opening paper of HARPER'S MAGAZINE for January, Poultney Bigelow sums up the result of "Portuguese Progress in South Africa," show ing how ineffectual a colonizer Portugal has been during four centuries of nominal possession, and how demoralizing has been her influence upon the blacks. An important paper on "A Century's Struggle for the Franchise," from the pen of Professor Francis N.
