The progress of anthropology, according to the president of the section, seems more and more to confirm the theory adopted by Fustel de Coulanges in France and Spencer in England, that the belief in spirits lies at the basis of all religious systems. We thus see, to use his words, "that the group of theories and practices which constitute the great province of man's emotions and mental operations expressed in the term 'religion' has passed through the same stages, and produced itself in the same way, from rude early beginnings, as every other mental exertion." Mr. Brabrook mentions a work lately published by "a distinguished missionary of the Evangelical Society of Paris," the Rev. Mr. Coillard, in which an account is given of the superstitions prevailing among the natives of the upper Zambesi. The reverend gentleman tells of their belief in witchcraft, and gives a story of a young woman who was condemned to penal labor on suspicion of having bewitched, or tried to bewitch, another young woman who had taken her husband from her; the evidence of the crime being found in a dead mouse, which had been discovered in the second young woman's chamber. The missionary says: "She was made a convict. A few years ago she would have been burned alive. Ah, my friends, paganism is an odious and a cruel thing!" On which the president of the Anthropological Section observes: "Ah, Mr. Coillard, is it many years ago that she would have been burned alive or drowned in Christian England or Christian America? Surely the odiousness and the cruelty are not special to paganism any more than to Christianity." This is much to the point. If witchcraft is no longer a recognized crime in England or America, it is not because these lands are Christian, but because science is mixed with their Christianity. Even missionaries ought to know this. A great many different sciences are grouped under the name "anthropology," but they all have their rallying point in man, whose nature and history they seek to explore. The fact is that all sciences should have the same rallying point; and we trust that the greater interest which is visibly being taken year by year in anthropological studies will tend to humanize in a beneficial degree the whole circle of human knowledge. _AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIAL DECADENCE._