=Pawnshops in Germany.=--Between half a dozen and a dozen of the state pawnshops which were common in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still exist. The United States vice-consul at Cologne has given a considerable list of municipal pawnshops in the more important cities of all parts of Germany. On the whole, the number of these institutions is larger in Germany than in France, but smaller than in Belgium, Holland, and Italy. The business of pawnshops appears, at least more recently, to depend less upon general economic than on special, local causes. The German law has usually required private persons doing a pawnbroking business to take out special licenses, and has exercised a more or less strict supervision over them. The supervision practically lacked efficiency, and more stringent regulations were imposed by a statute enacted in 1879, which is now the basis of the existing law of the German Empire. Under this law license is refused to persons who are unfitted for the business, and is not issued at any rate unless a necessity is shown for the institution. The imperial law is supplemented by special laws of the various German states. * * * * * =Animals of the Ocean Depths.=--While plant life in the ocean is limited to shallow waters, Sir John Murray says fishes and members of all the invertebrate groups are distributed over the floor of the ocean at all depths. The majority of these deep-sea animals live by eating the mud, clay, or ooze, or by catching the minute particles of organic matter which fall from the surface. It is probably not far from the truth to say that three fourths of the deposits now covering the floor of the ocean have passed through the alimentary canals of marine animals. These mud-eating species, many of which are of gigantic size when compared with their allies living in the shallow coastal waters, become in turn the prey of numerous rapacious animals armed with peculiar prehensile and tactile organs. Many deep-sea animals present archaic characters; still, the deep sea can not be said to contain more remnants of fauna which flourished in remote geological periods than the shallow and fresh waters of the continents. * * * * *