quite ignorant of the
reasons given for this enormous expenditure: that there must be
unanswerable reasons we have no doubt whatever, for have not the Council
been unanimous to a man throughout. Not a single protest was entered.
Not a single speech was publicly made against it. But more wonderful
still, not a single speech was made publicly in the Council in its
favour. This did not arise from want of debating power on the part of
the members. It must have arisen from the unanswerable nature of the
arguments delivered in private committees, where, practically, no one
heard them, or of them, except the members themselves. The only
objection which can be raised to this theory is, that if the matter is
so very clear and simple, and the expenditure so imperatively called
for, it is most wonderful that some ingenuous simple-minded member had
not thought of making himself popular at one bound, by giving a little
information to the public as the matter proceeded, and so silence all
the grumbling and general dissatisfaction felt outside.

* * * * *

THE Gaelic Society of Inverness entered on its fifth session last month.
The Society has of late shown considerable signs of popularity and
progress; for close upon fifty members have been added to the roll
during the first eight months of the Society's year, while only eighteen
were added during the whole of the previous one. In 1873, seventy new
members were elected. The following five Clans are the best
represented--Mackenzies, 23 members; Frasers, 22; Mackays, 19;
Macdonalds, 18; Mackintoshes, 14. This is not as it should be; for while
the Mackays only occupy a little over a page of the Inverness Directory,
the Mackintoshes two, and the Mackenzies about three and a-half; the
Macdonalds occupy over four, and the Frasers seven pages. We would like
to see the Clans taking their proper places, by the "levelling-up"
process of course.

* * * * *

WE regret to announce the sudden death, on the 19th of August, of Dr
Hermann Ebel, Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of
Berlin. He superintended the new edition of Zeuss's _Grammatica
Celtica_, and was one of the four or five leading Celtic scholars of the
age.

* * * * *

IT will be seen that Logan's "Scottish Gael"--a book now getting very
scarce, and which was never, in consequence of its hi