commence with the year, and the back numbers will be sent to each
new subscriber unless a request to the contrary accompanies the order.

Instead of a notice being printed on the wrapper, announcing that a
subscription is about to end, the time of expiration is now denoted in
the printed address each week, so that the subscriber may see when the
period for which he has prepaid is about to expire.

* * * * *

DATES AND THE DATE PALM.

Even those whose knowledge of the customs of the Orient extends no
further than a recollection of the contents of that time-honored story
book, the "Arabian Nights," are doubtless aware that, since time
immemorial, the date has been the chief food staple of the
desert-dwellers of the East. The "handful of dates and gourd of water"
form the typical meal and daily sustenance of millions of human beings
both in Arabia and in North Africa, and to this meager diet
ethnologists have ascribed many of the peculiar characteristics of the
people who live upon it. Buckle, who finds in the constant consumption
of rice among the Hindoos a reason for the inclination to the
prodigious and grotesque, the depression of spirits, and the weariness
of life manifest in that nation, likewise considers that the morbid
temperament of the Arab is a sequence of vegetarianism. He points out
that rice contains an unusual amount of starch, namely, between 83 and
85 per cent; and that dates possess precisely the same nutritious
substances as rice does, with the single difference that the starch is
already converted into sugar. To live, therefore, on such food is not
to satisfy hunger; and hunger, like all other cravings, even if
partially satisfied, exercises control over the imagination. "This
biological fact," says Peschel, "was and still is the origin of the
rigid fastings prescribed by religions so widely different, which are
made use of by Shamans in every quarter of the world when they wish to
enter into communication with invisible powers." Peschel and Buckle,
however, are at variance as to the influence of the date diet as
affecting a race; and the former remarks that, "while no one will deny
that the nature of the food reacts upon the mental powers of man, the
temperament evoked by different sorts is different;" yet "we are still
far from having ascertained anything in regard to the permanent
effects of daily food, especially as the human stomach has, to a great
degre