n long journeys
and unknown routes. They will no longer be able to calculate, even
approximately, when the stock will return. England will therefore lose
an important percentage of its rolling stock, which will be but
incompletely replaced by the foreign wagons, which will remain in
England a much shorter time on account of the shorter distances. The
deficiency will have to be made up at considerable expense. The stock
will travel as far as the shores of the Black and Egean seas, to the
east coast of the Baltic, to the southernmost point of Italy, and to the
Pyrenees; it will pass over the lines of a dozen or more foreign
companies, be brought under the influence of three or four different
legislatures, police regulations, by-laws, Government inspections, etc.,
and where three or four different languages are officially in use.

Quite new legal obligations and intricacies will appear if the companies
having to forward goods direct into foreign countries send their wagons
into the territories of different jurisdictions. It will not be of much
use if the English companies attempt formally to confine their
transactions to the French railway which joins theirs. Claims from
Turkish, Russian, Austrian, Italian, German, Belgian, and French
railways will still be brought against them, in some cases requiring
direct and immediate communication.

A TOWN OF DWARFS.

A writer in the London "Times" describes the effect of excessive
intermarriage on the inhabitants of Protes, a little town in the
province of Santander, Spain. Until eighteen or nineteen years ago, the
village was quite shut off from the rest of the world. Its inhabitants,
from their ever-recurring intermarriages, had become quite a race of
dwarfs. On market days the priests might be seen, with long black coats
and high black hats, riding in to purchase the simple provision for the
week's consumption--men of little intelligence and no learning, sprung
from the lowest ranks. About eighteen years ago the Galician laborers,
or Gallegos, from the mines of Galicia, swarmed into the town for
lodgings, etc., and since their colonization the population has
increased in strength, stature, education, intellect, and morality.
Their intellects, also, have improved--intellects which had been
stunted, dwarfed, and ruined by their frequent intermarriages.

WHOOPING COUGH.

According to Dr. Sturges, an English physician, whooping cough is not
always to be escaped