THE GRAND CANALS.--Lesseps' Panama Canal has no bright prospect. The enterprise has been badly managed, has cost a great sacrifice of life, and over $200,000,000. It is employing from 12,000 to 14,000 men, but its finances are nearly exhausted, and an American engineer says it would take ten years for the present company to finish it, if they could raise the money. The Nicaragua Canal, if started now by Americans, would be finished first, and that would kill it entirely. Meantime Captain Ead's Ship Railway at Tehuantepec is likely to make canals unnecessary, for since his death his associate, Col. James Andrews, has undertaken to finish it, and $1,500,000 more has been raised at Pittsburg. This will carry the ships over the Isthmus by the railroad method. The German government has just begun a grand canal at Kiel, to connect the North Sea with the Baltic, large enough to allow ships to pass, drawing twenty-seven feet. Greece is slowly at work on a canal at the Isthmus of Corinth, and Massachusetts on a canal to cut off Cape Cod. Russia has determined to build a grand railroad to the Pacific Ocean across Asia, through Siberia, beginning next spring and finishing in five years. When finished, Russians could travel from St. Petersburg to the Pacific in fifteen days. THE SURVIVAL OF BARBARISM.--Amid the fussy pomposity of the Queen's jubilee, the voice of the thinkers has not been entirely silent. The utter failure of her reign to present a single noble thought or impulse, a single evidence of sympathy with the immense mass of suffering, has been sharply commented on, not only in prose, but in the vigorous verse of Robert Buchanan. The scientific periodical _Nature_ suggests very appropriately that, although the progress of the last half century has been due mainly to the labors of scientific men, the leaders in science have been unknown to the head of the government, and their labors prosecuted without aid or sympathy from the throne. "The brain of the nation has been divorced from the head." But why not? Has it not always been so; did not the barons who once ruled boast of their illiteracy? Science and philanthropy produce wealth and elevate the people. The rulers consume that wealth and keep the people down. Of course two classes so opposite are not in sympathy. In the late jubilee, the titled, the wealthy, and the hangers-on of government were given the prominent positions, and the scientists ignored; as Nature said: "England is not represented, but only England's paid officials and nobodies." But it is too soon for scientists to demand an honorable position. They should be content to escape the prison and the ostracism which was once the reward for nobly doing their duty.