The tea-growers of India, however, have a hopeful prospect before them. The consumption of the produce of their gardens has risen prodigiously, since the arrival of eight chests of tea from Assam caused such a sensation in the London market that the importers obtained from sixteen to thirty-four shillings a pound for it, or an average per pound of twenty-four shillings and sixpence. In 1851 the exportation of Indian tea amounted to 262,839 pounds; by 1863 it had risen to two and a half million pounds; in 1876 English buyers were found for 28,126,100 pounds. Every year sees an increase in the consumption of Indian tea; and unless their Chinese competitors look to it, they will gradually be beaten out of the field, for India possesses vast reserves of land fit for conversion into tea-gardens, and could, if need be, supply the wants of the whole world. PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON THE SPREAD OF DISEASE. We copy the following from our able contemporary, _Nature_. The views propounded have been already noticed in our paper on the 'Germ Theory.' 'In proposing a vote of thanks to Dr Corfield for his recent lecture on Infectious Diseases, Professor Tyndall paid a high compliment to the lecturer for the thoroughly sound instruction which he had so clearly conveyed. He had made it plain that contagion consisted, not of gas or vapour, but of definite particles, sometimes floating in gas, in the air we breathed, or in the water we drank; and that, like organic seeds in the soil, they multiplied themselves indefinitely in suitable media, the great probability being that these disease-producing particles were living things. A close study of the subject, extending now over several years, enabled him to agree entirely with the lecturer in the parallelism which he had declared to exist between the phenomena of contagious disease and the phenomena of ordinary putrefaction. The case of flies, for example, to which the lecturer ascribed the power of communicating disease from one person to another, was exactly paralleled by phenomena in putrefaction. Chop up a beefsteak, steep it in water, raise the temperature a little above the temperature of the blood, pour off the water, and filter it; you get a perfectly clear liquid; but that liquid placed in a bottle and exposed to the air soon begins to get turbid, and that turbid liquid, under the microscope, is found to be swarming with living organisms. By suitably heating this perfectly clear beef-tea, it can be sterilised, everything being killed which is capable of generating those little organisms which produce the turbidity; and by keeping it from coming in contact with the floating particles of the air, it might be preserved transparent for years. He had now some sterilised beef-tea of this sort which had been preserved for eighteen months in a state of perfect transparency. But if a fly dipped its foot into an adjacent vessel containing some of the turbid fluid, and then into the transparent fluid, that