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the senses, their prevision, and their ability to accommodate themselves to novel or accidental conditions, all indicate intention, foresight, and calculation; that they have their desires, passions, and caprices; and lead to the conclusion that they are endowed with reasoning powers so marked in kind and degree as to force the admission that "they have a fair claim to rank next to man in the scale of intelligence."

THE novels of the month are fair in quality and comparatively few in number, among them being two by native authors who are deserved favorites, Rev. William M. Baker (recently deceased, many of our readers will regret to learn) and Frank Lee Benedict. Our list comprises the following: The Price She Paid," by Frank Lee Benedict; The New Timothy," by William M. Baker, a new edition; Altiora Peto,13 by Lau

the community-sometimes numbering from 100,000 to 400,000 individuals-to which it belongs. They have some power of communicating their thoughts to each other, of giving information to one another, something approaching to language. If we ask ourselves whether they are conscious beings, it is difficult to deny them the gift of reason when we see them, often in the face of accidental conditions of which they could have had no previous experience, excavating chambers and tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering and storing food, nursing their young, feeding and making use of domestic animals, holding slaves, recognizing friends, and manifesting aversion to strangers and enemies, and, on the whole, there is good ground for the opinion that their mental powers differ from those of man not so much in kind as in degree. Ants have the power of distinguish-rence Oliphant; By the Gate of the Sea," by Daing light and colors, and of discriminating objects; but their perceptions of objects and their sensations of light and color must be very different from ours, since some colors affect their eyes which are imperceptible to ours, and the same may be true of objects. It would appear, therefore, that the colors and proportions of objects and the general aspect of nature must present to them a very different appearance from what they do to man. Though the subject is still involved in doubt, observations seem to indicate that ants are not deaf, as Huber and Forel maintained, but that they possess some sense of hearing, and that while they are insensible to sounds that affect us, they have the power to distinguish sounds which we can not hear. As regards the senses of smell and touch, there can be no doubt that both are highly developed in them. To sum up: The economy of labor and the ingenuity and inventiveness displayed under exceptional circumstances by ants, the social and friendly relations which exist between those of the same community, and between them and other animals, the hostility they manifest to stranger ants and other insects, their power of communicating their thoughts, their enjoyment of

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vid Christie Murray; His Triumph,15 by Mary E. Denison; Disarmed,1 by Miss Betham-Edwards; and Thicker than Water," by James Payn. Of the above it deserves to be noted that Altiora Peto and By the Gate of the Sea form the initial numbers of the new and tasteful yet cheap "Duodecimo Edition" of " Franklin Square Library" novels, just projected by the Messrs. Harper.

11 The Price She Paid. A Novel. By FRANK LEE BENEDICT. 12mo, pp. 429. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co.

12 The New Timothy. A Novel. By WILLIAM M. New York: Harper and Brothers. BAKER. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 71.

13 Altiora Peto. A Novel. By LAURENCE OLIPHANT. "Franklin Square Library." Duodecimo Edition, pp.

242. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The Same. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 58. New York: Harper and Brothers.

14 By the Gate of the Sea. A Novel. By DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY. "Franklin Square Library." Duodecimo Edition, pp. 116. New York: Harper and Brothers. New York: Harper and Brothers. The Same. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 29.

15 His Triumph. By MARY E. DENISON. 16mo, pp. 248. Boston: Lee and Shepard.

16 Disarmed. A Novel. By Miss BETHAM-EDWARDS. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 42. New York: Harper and Brothers.

17 Thicker than Water. A Novel. By JAMES PAYN. "Franklin Square Library." 4to, pp. 74. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Editor's Bistorical Record.

POLITICAL.

UR Record is closed on the 19th of September. The following State nominations were made: Nebraska Democratic August 29, J. W. Savage for Justice of the Supreme Court, and for Regents of the State University Dr. D. R. Daniels, G. W. Johnson, and J. M. Woolworth; Pennsylvania Greenback August 30, T. P. Rynder for Auditor-General, and Captain A. T. Marsh for Treasurer; New York Greenback September 5, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher for Secretary of State, Louis A. Post for AttorneyGeneral, G. L. Halsey for Comptroller, Julian Winne for Treasurer, E. A. Stillman for State

Engineer; New Jersey Democrats September 13, Leon Abbett for Governor; New Jersey Republicans September 18, Judge Jonathan Dixon for Governor.

The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed, August 22, by the joining of the two ends, thirty miles west of Mullen Tunnel, Montana. On the occasion of the formal opening, September 8, a golden spike was driven at the point of meeting.

The Irish Registration Bill was rejected in the House of Lords, August 21, by a vote of 52 nays to 32 yeas.

The French captured Hué, the capital of

Annam, August 25, and soon afterward a treaty of peace was signed.-On September 1 the French forces, after a desperate engagement, defeated the Black Flags, between Ha-Noi and Sontay.

According to official reports of the recent cholera epidemic in Egypt, there were 27,318 deaths up to September 1.

DISASTERS.

August 15.-Twelve miners killed by the breaking of a rope, near Redruth, England. August 21.-One-third of the city of Rochester, Minnesota, destroyed by a cyclone. Railroad train on its way from Rochester to Zumbrota lifted from the track and completely demolished. Thirty persons killed and fifty wounded.

August 25.-Twenty-three workmen killed by the fall of a scaffold at the King of Ba- | varia's new palace on Chiem See.

August 26.-Eighteen of the crew of the steamer Woodburn lost, with the vessel, off Eddystone Light.-Many fishing vessels wrecked off the Grand Bank. Over sixty lives supposed to have been lost.

August 27.-Violent volcanic eruptions near the island of Java, followed by a huge tidal wave causing the loss of many thousand lives. Several towns were destroyed, light-houses disappeared, and the mountain of Kramatoa sank beneath the sea. Sunda Strait was greatly changed, and navigation rendered dangerous.

August 28.-Explosion of steamer Riverdale's boilers, on the North River, New York. Five persons killed and several injured.

TH

August 31.-News of the loss of the Dutch arctic steamer Varna, in the Kara Sea, on July 4.-Steamer Ludwig, sixty days out from Antwerp, with seventy persons on board, given up

for lost.

September 2.-Forty persons killed in a crowd run into by a railroad train at Steglitz.

September 4.-Nine militiamen killed and fifteen wounded by a railroad accident near Grayville, Illinois.

September 14.-News of the loss of the steamer Proteus, of the Greely Relief Expedition, in Smith Sound, July 23.

OBITUARY.

August 18.-At Cardiff, Wales, William Wirt Sikes, author and United States Consul, aged forty-six years.

August 19.-At York, Pennsylvania, Judge Jeremiah S. Black, in his seventy-fourth year. August 24.-At Frohsdorf, the Comte de Chambord, aged sixty-three years.

August 27.--Announcement of death, on July 13, of Ranavalo II., Queen of Madagascar. September 3.-At Bougival, France, Ivan Sergyeevich Tourguéneff, aged sixty-five years. September 11.-In Paris, France, Henri Conscience, aged seventy years.

September 12.-At Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, Hugh J. Hastings, of the Commercial Advertiser, aged sixty-five years.

September 16.-At Manchester, Massachusetts, Junius Brutus Booth, aged sixty-two years.

September 18.-In London, England, John Payne Collier, in his ninety-fifth year.

Editor's Drawer.

HERE appears to be too much electricity | course, when it enters the port of New York, around this year, or else it is unevenly to a duty), and we make it repeat speech, turn distributed. It is a year of uncommon atmos- machinery, and dispel darkness. We have pheric disturbance, volcanic activity, and gen- done all this within a few years, and got to eral disaster. We can not yet predict these feel quite comfortable in our ability to handle disturbances and disasters, but in our newly it, and yet every few days it shows new freaks, acquired wisdom we fancy that we can assign mocks us with its subtle eccentricity, storms their cause. We watch what we call electric the sun, tears the earth to pieces, and declares storms in the sun, and its ominous and chan- itself master instead of servant. ging spots, and though we are not sure that the sun's troubles induce our earthly calami- | ties, yet we are inclined to refer both to one cause. We fortunately have an agency, about | which we know little, that can be made accountable for all our unexplained misfortunes. In our empirical condition electricity now is as useful in our perplexity as malaria is to the doctors in their experiments: it is a handy scapegoat. We know, in fact, that electricity is the most skittish agency that man ever attempted to harness to his uses. We have tamed it to go in single and double teams, duplex and even quadruplex; we can send it round the globe on a wire, or we can store it and carry it round in a trunk (subject, of

All this is so clearly outside the province of the Drawer that we should not have alluded to it but for another aspect of the electric agency, which is clearly within our purview, and that is the moral. We know that it is usually held nowadays that crime is either hereditary, or caused by badly cooked food, poor clothes, and unwholesome lodgings; at any rate, that it is a disease, with little personal responsibility, caused by something akin to malaria, and to be cured by physical treatment. The so-called criminal should be pitied rather than punished. If a man is properly nurtured he will be pure. It is so well settled that when an exception occurs in the case of a well-nurtured man or woman who steals, we

put the action out of the catalogue of crimes by calling it kleptomania. And the proof of this is that no poor and shabby person has ever been known to have kleptomania. We are accustomed also to trace other delinquencies to like causes. We know that certain views of life and moral duty, called by their authors systems of philosophy, are due to dyspepsia. We have recently had Carlyle explained by a diagnosis of his stomach made by Mrs. Carlyle and Mr. Froude. We can tell the cause of most of our latter-day poetry: we say at a glance that such a poem came from the undercrust of a pie, and that another one is the result of anæmia, and that another has the sentiment of gin, and that others show a clogged state of the biliary duct. A proper course of medical treatment would cure most of these.

crime as it is of virtue-the latter resulting, of course, from a well-regulated electricity— there is a practical suggestion to be made. Instead of coddling criminals, as we should do if they are simply unfortunate victims of disease, we ought to treat them by electricity. Police courts ought to be provided with electrometers, or whatever machine it is for measuring the quantity of electric fluid in an object, and put those arraigned to a scientific test, not for the purpose of punishment, but of cure. A bad man is merely an overcharged thunder-cloud. Of course he is dangerous. He ought to be shut up until his electric condition is made normal. We can not afford to run the risk of being struck by his lightning. And our jails and penitentiaries ought to be under charge of electricians. We want, in short, to apply electricity to moral diseases as we do to physical, and no one can tell what wonders may be wrought. The treatment can always be adjusted to the condition of the subject. The electrician can strike some of them with lightning at once, and end all. Or he can give just the right charge to induce a flow of virtue through the heart. It must be matter of experiment for a good while. But if the system works well in prisons, a still wider field is opened outside for this moral agency. Perhaps those characters known as dangerous women" are merely the subjects of electric disturbance. All they need is the battery to become sweet ornaments of society. If this theory is sound, a glorious prospect is before us. What could not a skillful electrician do in Congress and in our State Legislatures? A new era will dawn when we can rectify moral evil as easily as we can whisper the tones of endearment into a beloved, delicate, pink ear fifty miles from our lips.

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This is, as they say of evolution, a very pretty working theory for philanthropists, but it does not altogether satisfy us. Does it account for the suicides, of which there has been an epidemic in 1883? Or for the eccentric conduct of so many women, which is reported in our daily newspapers? Or for the moral condition of what is called fast and high society in London and New York and Bucharest? Not satisfactorily. But there is an agency that covers the whole like a mantle. We do not say that sin is merely perverted electricity. But we do say that in all our observation of mankind it never before acted as it has done since the sun spots turned up. There may have always been spots in the sun; perhaps there has, as there has always been more or less wickedness around; but we have been very slow to see the connection between the two. We can now, by the light of electricity itself, so to speak, observe the close relation of electric disturbances to moral disorders. If there is anything in this theory, when we have electric storms we ought not only to look out for A MILLIONAIRE in Philadelphia who inatmospheric disasters, shipwrecks, tidal waves, dorses the views of Mr. Charles Francis Adams, earthquakes, and for collisions and railway Jun., about the dead languages, says that he and steamboat catastrophes, which are direct-lives in the most convenient place in the city, ly caused by human stupidity and careless- for "the horse-cars run pro and con on his ness, but also for an access of mental disor- street." ders, crimes, and eccentricities. People are probably moved to suicide and a general violation of the decalogue (we refer to the old one, and not to the Shapira revision) by electricity. The normal electric conductors of the system are disturbed. Under such a disturbance some are made ill, some fly to poetry, some steal, some slander, some run off with other people's husbands. This of course. But the question is, are we always controlled in our actions by this subtle fluid, even when there is no unusual display of it? For instance, is "affinity" electricity? We have not space here to pursue the subject, which our readers will see has infinite relations to human life.

But assuming the physical, mental, and moral interference of electricity with human beings, and that it is as much the cause of

In this country first, second, and third class cars are not common on our railways, and those who travel much know that occasionally persons who belong in the cattle train get into a passenger-car. An accident of this sort, which is related by the Lynn (Massachusetts) Transcript, the Drawer desires to make as conspicuous as possible for the benefit of all concerned. The incident occurred on the Eastern Railroad, between Boston and Lynn.

A very well known citizen of Lynn, returning from Boston, found the cars very much crowded, and in fact only one seat not occupied by a passenger, but utilized by one to hold a valise. Our fellow-citizen, whom we will call Mr. B—, quietly lifted the baggage from the cushion with a view to setting it on the floor and filling the seat himself.

The traveller retained the valise and at-head, came down the path and out of the gate tempted to go; but the conductor sternly said: "If you don't leave that I'll arrest you. I will take it to head-quarters in Boston, where you can get it by proving property."

IT is hard to be good, early. A mother re-ity. "Can I get a night's lodging here? I cently took her four-year-old boy to church, but had to be constantly chiding him for speaking out in meeting. He finally broke out: "Mamma, if you won't let me talk, take off my shoes so I can work my toes."

"You don't say so! Where did you serve? and what's the name of your colonel and brigade commander ?"

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you are the first of the boys I've seed dressed up like a wax figger! I ax your pardon again. A soldier, even if he fit agin me, would er been welcome, but I do hate a buzzard bummer worse than a rattlesnake."

Next morning there was a smoking good breakfast ready for the major. His horse, already bridled and saddled, was waiting at the gate, to which his host accompanied him. As he mounted, the giant, as if in justification of his want of penetration, waved his hand toward him, and said:

"You see, major, them breeches was mightily agin yer." And as he rode off, after a hearty shake of the hand, and charged with innumerable messages to "General John and Colonel George," called out, "Better not be wanderin' round Texas in 'em, major; them breeches is mightily agin yer.”

Satisfactory answers were given to these A GENTLEMAN in an Eastern city, having ocquestions, and the giant, laying aside his sus-casion to publish a paper on local antiquities, picious, unfriendly manner, said, heartily:

"That's all right. You kin stay a year, ef you want to. Git down. What mought your name be?"

"Major B.”

stated that a certain old house was formerly occupied by the "step-mother of Colonel Lear, Washington's private secretary." Soon after, he received a call from one of the descendants of the same family, who, with great indigna

"Any relation to General John B and tion, informed him that "Mrs. Lear was no such Colonel George B——?"

"Yes; nephew."

"Nephew! Git right down off that horse. Git down, I tell you! git down! Come right in. Nephew! Well, ef that don't beat the Jews! I fit the Indians fur ten years with old Jack, and his brother was colonel of my regiment," burst out the giant, and throwing away his torch, he almost seized the major bodily, and having helped him to alight, caught up his saddle-bags and pistols, and led the way into the cabin, shouting to an invisible wife:

"Looisy! Looisy! come here! Here's a nephew of my old colonel. Git some supper. Kill a chicken and make some biscuits right away, and be sure the coffee is good. Be quick about it, now."

a person, but always bore a most respectable character."

SISYPHUS TO THE STONE.

SISYPHUS, having tried in vain to roll the stone to the top of the hill, one day thought it might not be a bad idea to talk to and reason with it, and so he stopped when about halfway to the top, braced his feet against a couple of projecting rocks, lay with his chest against the stone, and remarked:

"Well, now, you are an unsociable sort of a stone, anyhow, to go rolling back against me all the time. I have been acquainted with you a long while now, and you don't seem to like me at all. What did I ever do to you that you should roll back and break my ribs, and knock out my artificial teeth, and keep me in "Looisy" was not prepared to meet the pub- a lather of perspiration all the time? In winlic gaze, and remained invisible some time-in-ter, when it is cold, and the hill is all slippery, deed, until she had cooked the meal her husband had ordered-when she came in to make acquaintance-a pale, delicate-looking woman, in a perfectly new calico dress. Never was a more cordial welcome given a visitor. Supper over, the two soldiers sat talking on the little porch until very late.

"Got any terbacker about yer close?" inquired mine host.

you allow me to roll you half-way up, and then suddenly fall back, and we both go rolling down together. And then in the summertime, when it is ninety in the shade, you get me so warm that my standing collar grows limp, and my collar-button soaks out of the button-hole and works down my back. And when I begin to feel happy because I know I have got you almost to the top, you suddenly whirl

hill, and I get my clothes all torn, and sand down my back."

Pipes were lit, and it was under that confid-back, and down we go to the bottom of the ing influence that he said, in a shamefaced, awkward way between the puffs of smoke: "You must have thought me a low-lived cuss and no gentleman to turn you off like that, but dern me if I didn't think you was one of them Yankee bummers or a Freedman's Bureau! I ax your pardon fur it freely. But

Here Sisyphus paused, because he was rested, and started to push the stone up a little further. He hadn't pushed it far before he lost his footing, and down they went together. When they reached the bottom, Sisyphus said: