by cutting down the tree it is captured, for it cannot rise when once on the ground. It cannot spend a comfortable life, for it has likewise the very inconvenient appendage of a large upper lip, which would be sadly in its way were it not for the simple expedient of walking backwards, instead of forwards, when grazing. There is also an animal named the Catoblepas, whose glance, if it meets the glance of a man, causes instant death. But what does the considerate animal do? It always walks with its head down to the ground. But not so the Basilisk: though a serpent, it erects itself straight upon the end of its tail, and progresses (we are not told how) in this imposing manner, continually looking round on purpose, and thus destroying not merely animals, but plants and trees, and causing even stones to break to pieces. Yet nature, says Pliny, has provided a match for it in the weasel, for if a weasel be put in the basilisk's hole, both basilisk and weasel will die.

The Amphisbæna, another serpent, has a head where its tail ought to be: others stiffen themselves like a lance, and project themselves so as to transfix their enemies.

The Egyptian ichneumon, before it attacks serpents, fits itself with armour for the purpose. It rolls itself in mud and suffers the first coat to dry; then rolls itself again, covering itself with layer after layer till it is as hard as a stone. It is also the chief foe of the crocodile. When the latter animal is troubled with leeches in his mouth and throat, he lies on the bank with his mouth open: upon which a small wren enters his mouth and employs itself in removing the leeches which annoy its friend. The operation over, the crocodile goes to sleep, still with its mouth open; of this the ichneumon takes advantage, jumps down his throat, and feeds upon his vitals.

The hippopotamus, when gorged with over feeding, searches for a stout and sharp reed, against which he strikes his leg so as to pierce it. When he thinks he has let himself bleed long enough, he closes the place with mud.

To come down to smaller animals: when a pair of Alpine mice, or marmots, are collecting food at the time of laying up their winter store of provision, one of the animals lies down; the other piles upon its body whatever is to be carried home: then taking the end of his partner's tail in his mouth, drags away body load and all to the nest where they live. This is the reason, says Pliny, that their backs are always scratched: and no wonder.

The hedgehog has another way of carrying his food home; he lies down and rolls in the middle of it, and goes away with it sticking on his spines. It is to be supposed that when he comes home, he finds some one to take them off for him.

The melis, or marten, can so distend its outer skin, like a bladder, separate from its flesh, that blows or bites cannot injure it.

It must not be supposed that Pliny tells nothing but such marvels and travellers' tales: on the contrary, there can be found in him many facts of great value, laboriously collected. We have taken the above from book viii, on land animals: in time we shall come to the birds and fishes.

F. I.

RAGGED SCHOOLS.

YING between the criminal and destitute and the industrious well-to-do poor children, there is a large horde who are by slow degrees and very scantily embraced by Ragged Schools. In June last it seemed good to the Committee of Council to put forth a minute, whereby great encouragement was given to these schools, and sundry grants promised in aid of their teachers' salaries, and even of the food given to the children. Whereupon philanthrophy was jubilant; and ragged schools threatened to increase and multiply apace; which seems to have alarmed the treasury, for lo! another edict has just issued, confining these munificent grants to reformatories, or to such ragged schools as can get it certified by two justices that none other children frequent them than such as are either prone to become criminal, or are without house and home-intensely vagrant in short. Now very few, if any, ragged schools are wholly filled by such outcast urchins. Some few are always admitted because their parents are too poor or ill disposed to give them the benefit of schooling for which they would have to pay; and who (as Miss Carpenter, of Bristol, very justly says,) "would grow up without any education, and consequently become an incubus on the community." In a circular recently printed on this subject, it is truly argued that, "to be efficient for their object of giving a useful education to this class, ragged schools must be good; to be good they must be far more expensive than ordinary schools, no pence being paid by the children, and besides this, and in various ways, the expenditure being greater. More than double the amount of pecuniary outlay and voluntary exertions are needed to make a ragged school good, than a day school; and it is a principle already recognised by Government that aid shall be granted, with inspection, in proportion to the effort made."

"Ragged schools should, therefore, receive a larger amount of aid from the educational grant than day schools, and this aid should be so directed as to secure the school being good, and therefore efficient."

The new regulation is clearly intended to check an obvious abuse. The grants are on a far more liberal scale than those made to common day schools. Consequently common day schools have a direct inducement to become, or pretend that they are, ragged schools. The prevention of the abuse, however, will well nigh extinguish the use along with it. Ragged schools cannot be exclusively filled with a purely criminal class, or with houseless and homeless young vagabonds. There must always be a good number of those we have described. The necessity is to prevent any from being admitted who can get into common schools, and a certificate to the effect that all such were rigorously excluded might, one would imagine, suffice.

A very large grant of public money-probably more than half a million— will be voted this year for education, and none of it will be more usefully applied than that which goes to 'ragged and reformatory schools, both of which are "" distinctly recognised" by the June minute of the Committee of Council, and which will form perhaps the most interesting if not the most important part of the dealings of Government with education on the principle that the whole need not the physician; and that society is first concerned in the cure of those whose diseases are noxious to itself.

THE DECIMAL COINAGE QUESTION.

F only the convenience of bankers, merchants, and professed arithmeticians had to be considered, it is probable that the most suitable decimal system for this country would be the millesimal division of the pound sterling. But the interests of the community at large must not be lost sight of, and it needs but a very little reflection to convince one's self that, so far as the masses are concerned, the scheme would prove to be both impracticable and mischievous, and consequently a complete failure.

It is fondly imagined by the advocates of the pound-and-mil system that, on the passing of an act of Parliament depreciating the copper coinage four per cent. people would at once and for ever banish from their speech and thoughts that "household word of many centuries-the penny-and thenceforward estimate the value of all their small purchases in "mils" or farthings. How little do those who expect this understand human nature! Even if the alteration rendered petty calculations more easy, which, however, is very far from being the case, 999 out of every thousand buyers and sellers would, from sheer force of habit, stick to the depreciated penny, and speak of a loaf or a yard of ribbon as costing eightpence or seventeenpence, in preference to the proposed 32 mils or 68 mils. They would also, however perversely it might seem to the millesimist, call 121d. a shilling, instead of five cents, and 25d. two shillings, instead of a florin. Accordingly the new plan would involve the study of a revised "pence table," in which 20d. would be 1s. 74d.; 30d. 2s. 5d.; 40d. 3s. 24d.; and so on. Also the shopkeeper, who might require to book his accounts by the new method, would have to be well up in his farthings table and other mental aids for momentarily reducing shillings and pence to the three new terms of account-florins, cents, and mils-and vice versa. So that instead of finding decimal coinage 66 a boon," his arithmetical difficulties would be greatly increased thereby.

In addition to a multitude of such inconveniences and annoyances as have just been glanced at, there would be positive injury inflicted on the bulk of the population, in the shape of a serious pecuniary loss in an increasing ratio to the poverty of the people. The following items of a Saturday night's expenditure in a grocer's shop, by the wife of a mechanic, will illustrate this effect of substituting the "mil" for the penny as a standard of value :

Now here, although the alteration in each item is only about half a farthing, it amounts in the aggregate to threepence, being equivalent to a tax on the poor woman's outlay of eighteen pence in the pound. And in return for this, be it remembered, she derives not the least shadow of benefit whatever. But the rich merchant or banker will, at her expense, be enabled to save a few seconds of his valuable time in casting up a column of his cash book.

It is asserted that competition would at some indefinite period set all this to rights. Competition forsooth! As if competition had not long ago far exceeded its just limits, and merged into a disgraceful rivalry in the adulteration of almost every necessary of life. The result of competition would be very likely an increased proportion of spurious leaves in the tea; of roasted beans or some viler stuff in the coffee; of flour and turmeric in the mustard; of "P. D." in the pepper; &c. &c. No. The small shopkeeper would be compelled either to sacrifice, it may be, five shillings in the pound of his ordinary business profits, or to overcharge his customers at the rate of from five to twenty per cent. on all articles under sixpence in price. There would certainly be no middle course practicable.

S. A. GOOD.

INFLUENCE OF TEACHER'S EXAMPLE.-Teacher, your Sabbath scholar is an emigrant, a voyager on the stormy ocean of life. It is an important crisis in his history, and it is for you to answer the serious questions-How must he act? What preparations must he make? What and where are the sandbanks and rocks which he must avoid? For what port is he bound? Will you advise him to steer in one direction while you are swiftly sailing in the contrary? Will you enumerate certain necessary equipments for his voyage, not one of which you have procured for yourself? Will you counsel him to shun rocks and whirlpools towards which your own bark is drifting to a swift destruction? Will you bid him to steer straight for the Fair Havens while you are scudding rapidly to the bleak cliffs of ruin and despair? This is folly-arrant, unutterable folly. Be assured the quick and discerning intellect of your scholars can and will compare your line of teaching with your line of practice, conduct, and experience; and as sure as these diverge and disagree, so sure will your labour be like sowing chaff or beating the air.-James Wray.

ORIENTAL STUDIES.

QUESTION of great practical importance, and one which will increase in moment from year to year, is that of Indian Studies and means of acquiring knowledge on the affairs of that vast peninsula. India, once to us as to other nations, a land little known, save as a treasure house of fabulous wealth, is now so entirely open, from the mountains to the sea, to our inquiries, that the mystic lore of the Brahmins and the constitutional enactments of Moghuls, are nearly as accessible to all classes in England as the dramas of Shakespere, or the provisions of the Bill of Rights. Still more, by the recent changes in the Company's affairs, it is possible for any young man possessed of a fair share of learning, to win for himself the right of ruling, judicially and financially, a large section of this wondrous, rich, and ancient country. These things being so, it is a matter of surprise, no less than of regret, that so little interest is taken by Englishmen in general, in the rich and varied languages, the "strange eventful history," the profound political institutions of India. Whether it be that we are ignorant, or careless, or mistrustful of the authenticity of information coming from so great a distance; certain it is that, to the mass of Englishmen, India is as much an unknown land as it was to their ancestors three hundred years ago. Oriental books are unfortunately, as a general rule, expensive; and though of late years many excellent editions and translations of Persian, Hindustani, and Sanskrit works have issued from the press, there is still much to be done in this department of knowledge.

We will direct our attention first to the languages of India, as essentially necessary to those who desire to become really acquainted with the Hindoos as a people. Perhaps no language that was ever known surpasses the Sanskrit in majesty, in perfection of grammatical refinement, in grace, in accuracy. It is unrivalled, whether used as a means of commercial and practical intercourse, as a subject for philological research, or as a vehicle of philosophical subtleties. It forms a third in the group of the Indo-Germanic tongues, with the Latin and Greek, and while it elucidates many seeming anomalies in those languages, forms the link which binds together the speech of the Saxon and the Persian: the stepping stone which leads from the knowledge of the one to that of the other. It has been questioned whether this language should be learned as a necessary condition by all those who aspire to civil distinction in India. The subject has been discussed by far abler heads than ours, therefore it may be well to remark no more than this, that at the college where, under the old regime, youths for the Indian civil service were prepared, and still are so, this language has been for several years taught with much success as a precursor of Hindustani and Persian. The dullest intellect recognises forms of expression and words which are transferred from Sanskrit to these modern tongues, and thus, much labour is spared and the words and phrases fixed in the memory indelibly. The case is much as if we should doubt whether it were better to learn a problem of Euclid by heart, or by studying and understanding the proper sequence of step on step, till the proof follows as a natural deduction. You may teach a boy the abstract and arbitrary terms of a language and by dint of hard work fix them in his memory, but when he has to learn four languages sufficiently well to enable him to converse in them fluently, to compose