daily increasing in that city. Moreover, the good roads enable farmers to use motor wagons, and they are already used to a great extent for transportation purposes. In Germany sixty thousand workmen were em ployed in bicycle factories in 1896. This does not include those making only separate parts, such as rubber tires, etc., who would probably bring the number up to one hundred thousand.
Representative Joseph C. Sibley, of Pennsyl vania, has a plan for the annihilation of hostile fleets should they approach one of our harbors. He says if benzine is conducted through pipes under the water and released, the fluid will rise to the surface and permeate the atmosphere to the height of twenty feet above the water. He adds that the fumes of the benzine would be certain to penetrate to the fires aboard the ship, and he believes no powdermagazine is tight enough to exclude this vapor. With the air thus charged, any hostile ship afloat would be rent into a thousand pieces.
A syndicate of young thieves in Paris has been working the profitable industry of robbing the robber. At the great fashion shops of the Louvre and the Bon Marche, the detectives whose duty it is to watch for the shop-lifter have been assisted for many weeks by a band of amateurs whose existence they never suspected. The false inspectors enter the shops as customers, and hang about until they find their suspect departing with purloined goods. Then having got their victim, generally a woman, they track her home, demand the restitution of the stolen property, and insist upon searching her rooms. Here there are countless opportunities for plunder. Anything that is new or handsome they can claim as stolen property, and the detected one is of course in no position to resist. The influence of various occupations upon health and longevity is the subject of an interesting investi gation just completed by an officer of the registrargeneral's department of the British government. A vast collection of figures, comparative tables, etc., has just been issued as a public document, and some of the deductions from them are instructive and of interest. First and foremost comes overwhelming proof that work or occupation of some sort is the greatest promoter of longevity. It is almost alone in England of all civilized countries that this fact can be brought out clearly in public statistics, for it is only in England that the leisure class, so called, is sufficiently large for the comparison to be made.
225
LITERARY NOTES. The May Atlantic opens brilliantly with Hon. Richard Olney's timely and trenchant discussion of the " International Isolation of the United States." Other interesting and timely articles are John T. Morse, Jr.'s "History and Summary of the Dreyfus and Zola Trials," " Psychology and the Real Life," by Prof. Hugo MUnsterberg, " English Literature and the Vernacular," by Prof. Mark H. Liddell, and "Western Land Booms and After," by Henry J. Fletcher. Ainsworth R. Spofford, late librarian of Congress, begins his fascinating " Washington Remi niscences" with vivid sketches of Peter Force and Wm. P. Fessenden. Mrs. Ellen Olney Kirk fur nishes a charming and characteristic novelette, entitled "A Last Appearance."
The May number of Harper's Magazine con tains "Awakened Russia," by Julian Ralph, the first of a series of articles treating Russia as a militant power in the fore-front of modern, political and terri torial movements; " The Trans-Isthmian Canal Prob lem," with a full-page map, by Col. William Lud low, U.S.A.; " Varallo and the Val Sesia," by Edwin Lord Weeks; "East Side Considerations," by E. S. Martin; " University Life in the Middle Ages," by Prof. W. T. Hewett. In the way of fiction this number includes "Good for the Soul," by Margaret Deland; "How Order No. 6 Went Through, as told by Sun-Down Leflare," by Fred eric Remington; "The Bishop's Memory," by Mar guerite Merington; " Old Sile's Clem," by Paschal H. Coggins.
No one who is interested in the best contemporary French literature can afford to miss the series of sketches and stories by Paul Bourget, which be gan in The Living Age for April 2. These sketches have been but recently published in France, and this is their first appearance in English dress. They are translated for The Living Age by William Marchant. They are extremely clever and characteristic.
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly for May contains an article on " Snow Crystals," illustrated by a series of actual photographs taken by the aid of a microscope. The advances made in " Kite-Flying" during 1897 are described in a fully illustrated article by George J. Varney. Other important articles are A Study of Children's Ideals;" "The Wheat Question," by Yrorthington C. Ford; and "The West Indian Bridge between America," by J. W. Spencer.
North and
South
