A new motor, called a ‘Triple Thermic Motor,’ has, it is said, been in use in New York for the past seven months driving a sixty horse-power engine. Heat is generated by a fifteen horse-power boiler, and the steam thus raised is carried to a receptacle containing carbon disulphide, which passes into vapour at one hundred and eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. An engineer, in reporting upon this new contrivance, says that the fifteen horse-power boiler with very little fire under it generates steam, which operates the motor, which in turn runs the sixty horse-power engine. These seem to be all the particulars published; and it would be interesting to have details of the motor, if it be really as successful as reported. There are one or two difficulties to surmount in the employment of carbon disulphide. It has a most disagreeable and penetrating odour; its vapour is highly inflammable; and lastly, it is by no means cheap. Some interesting particulars of the American lead-pencil trade have recently been published. With the improved machinery now in use, it is possible for ten men to turn out four thousand pencils a day. The cedar comes from Florida in slabs cut to pencil-length. Four parallel grooves are sawn in each little slab, each groove being destined to hold the lead, or rather graphite. The so-called leads are kept in hot glue, and after being inserted in the grooves, are covered over with a thin slab of cedar, also glued; then the whole is passed through a moulding-machine, and comes out at the other side in the form of four finished pencils. The graphite is mixed with a variable amount of white clay—the greater the proportion of clay the harder the pencil—and is ground with moisture into a paste. The paste is pressed into dies, and is baked at a high temperature. The recent outbreak of smallpox in London reminds us that we have not yet succeeded in stamping out this loathsome disease, although the practice of vaccination has checked it to a wonderful extent. Anti-vaccination agitators are very fond of pointing to the circumstance that many persons who have been apparently successfully vaccinated in childhood are in after-years attacked with smallpox. This is perfectly true; and statistics are available which show that in the years between 1871 and 1881 nearly eighteen thousand such cases were treated in the London hospitals. But the popular agitator abstains from pointing out that in ninety per cent. of these cases the sufferers were above ten years of age. These figures prove, in fact, what has been long ago acknowledged, that vaccination does not afford permanent protection. When a child reaches adult age, revaccination should take place. In our smallpox hospitals, the nurses and attendants enjoy complete immunity from infection by taking care to adopt this precaution; and all persons, for the general good of the community at large, would do well to submit to the trifling inconvenience which the operation entails.