these, known as the Baumes Chaudes, is a great triple cavern, one of the main branches of which had yielded a large number of prehistoric skeletons to Dr. Prunières, of Marvejol. In the third division are a number of deep pits, locally called "wells," from forty to a hundred and thirty feet deep; these communicate with lower passages and subterranean streams. They are death-traps to animals, the remains of which, of many kinds and in all stages of decomposition, accumulate at the bottom, and are gradually covered by stalagmitic deposits. Another remarkable cave was discovered and named after its daring and enthusiastic explorer, M. Louis Armand, of Paris. It can only be entered by a "well" two hundred and forty feet deep, and below this lies another of still greater depth. The party was provided with rope ladders for use in such places; and the intrepid investigator who essayed the descent went down, by actual measurement, six hundred feet from the surface. He described the stalactites as magnificent. Both from a geological and an archæological point of view this account was of unusual interest. Dr. Hovey had many beautiful views of the cañons and the cave openings in their walls; while his observations, and those of the Société de Spéléologie, are very curious as to the persistence, in this strangely overlooked region, of conditions closely akin to what are usually called "prehistoric" times. =Molecular Asymmetry and Life.=--Speaking in his presidential address to the Chemical Section of the British Association on Stereochemistry and Vitalism, Prof. A. R. Japp expressed the conclusion that "the production of single asymmetric compounds or their isolation from the mixture of their enantiomorphs [or opposite forms] is, as Pasteur firmly held, the prerogative of life. Only the living organism, with its asymmetric tissues, or the asymmetric productions of the living organism, or the living intelligence with its conception of asymmetry, can produce this result. Only asymmetry can beget asymmetry. The absolute origin of the compounds of one-sided asymmetry is a mystery as profound as the absolute origin of life itself. The two phenomena are intimately connected.... No fortuitous concourse of atoms, even with all eternity for them to clash and combine in, could compass this feat of the formation of the first optically active organic compound. Coincidence is excluded, and every purely mechanical explanation of the phenomena must necessarily fail. I see no escape from the conclusion that at the moment when life first arose a directive force came into play--a force of precisely the same character as that which enables the intelligent operator, by the exercise of his will, to select one crystallized enantiomorph and reject its asymmetric opposite. I would emphasize the fact that the operation of a directive force of this nature does not involve a violation of the law of the conservation of energy."