EXTENSION OF ASTRONOMY.--An interesting and important announcement is made by an English scientist, Dr. Pritchard, of Oxford, which, if confirmed, will give a great deal of satisfaction to all who study the evening skies. He has succeeded in throwing out his measure-line to one of the fixed stars. Hitherto measurement has virtually stopped with our own solar system. The angles which form the basis of calculations for the remoter stellar spaces are so infinitesimal that human vision can take no certain and uniform cognizance of them. Until now science could only draw its great circle and say: Within this the millions of suns which shine upon the earth from all directions are not; how far they really are beyond, no one can tell, only conjecture. But now comes the camera, a veritable new eye for science, as sensitive as the optic nerve and a thousand times more steadfast and tireless, being able to hold its gaze upon the minutest object of search hour after hour, without blinking. It is with this new eye that Dr. Pritchard has succeeded, as he thinks, in reading the infinitesimal figures on the milestone of the star 61 Cygni. He gives the distance as fifty billions of miles, and reminds us that this star is probably the nearest to us of all the bodies in space outside our own planetary system.--_Home Journal_. A NEW BASIS FOR CHEMISTRY has been published by Thos. Sterry Hunt, 165 pages, price, $2. Prof. Hunt dispenses entirely with the atomic theory, but that does not make the mystery of definite combinations any clearer. It is only "confusion worse confounded." CHLOROFORM IN HYDROPHOBIA.--Dr. V. G. Miller, an old army surgeon of Osage Mission, Kansas, says that he once treated a terrible case of hydrophobia with chloroform, using altogether about three pounds. It conquered the spasms. A slimy, stringy secretion ran out of the man's mouth which probably carried off the poison, and for a long time he could not swallow, but in three weeks he entirely recovered. The salivary glands seem to have a close relation to hydrophobia. Many years ago reports were published from Russia on the authority of M. Marochetti, a hospital surgeon, of the cure of hydrophobia, by piercing with a red hot needle certain swellings that rose under the tongue, and giving a decoction of broom. Dr. M. said that fourteen were cured in this manner. This discovery seems to have been forgotten.