The object of the Pure Food and Drug Congress, which met in Washington in March, 1898, with Joseph E. Blackburn, of Columbus, Ohio, as president, is declared in its resolutions to be to secure suitable national legislation to prevent the adulteration of food, drink, and drugs, to secure the enforcement of laws, and secure and promote uniformity of State legislation looking to that end; to create and maintain a high public sentiment on these subjects, to sustain public officers enforcing the laws respecting them; and to promote a more general intelligence concerning the injury to health and business interests resulting from food adulteration. In this work all are invited to join. The congress was in session four days, and several important papers were read to it. The large Atlantic coastal plain beginning with southern New Jersey, Mr. John Gifford affirms, in The Forester, would soon be capable, if protected from reckless devastation, of producing almost limitless quantities of the valuable smooth-bark or short leaf pine. In Northampton and Accomac Counties, Virginia, lying in this plain, the forests are already properly cared for and propagated without the aid of forest laws. This is done by insuring their freedom from fire, which is attended to purely as a matter of present economy. The value of the woods in holding the loose sandy soil and as windbreaks is recognized, and the litter of the pine trees is a precious dressing for the sweet potato fields. This litter, of pine "chats," "needles," or "browse," is carefully raked off every year and spread on the fields, and there is nothing left in which fire can start. The Lalande prize of the French Academy of Sciences has been conferred upon Prof. S. C. Chandler, of Cambridge, Mass., in recognition of "the splendor, the importance, and the variety" of his astronomical work; the Damoiseau prize upon Dr. George William Hill, of Washington, for his researches in mathematics and astronomy; and the Henry Wilde prize on Dr. Charles A. Schott, of Washington, for his researches in terrestrial magnetism. Prof. J. Mark Baldwin, of Princeton, author of the books The Development of the Child and the Race, Handbook of Psychology, and The Story of the Mind, has been elected a member of the French Institute of Sociology.