A new process for making sulphate of soda has been invented by M. Fournier, a Frenchman. It leaves behind as waste liquid a large quantity of a certain chloride, which turns out to be excellent for the precipitation of sewage. Hence it appears that nature and science combine to shew how the fertility of the land and the free channels of rivers may alike be maintained. The process has been patented in this country, and if all go well we may hope, in time, to hear that the sewage of London, instead of filling up the bed of the Thames, is increasing the fruitfulness of fields, gardens, and meadows in Essex and Kent. Meteorologists, in their review of the weather, inform us that in the gale on the 11th of November last, the barometer was lower, the wind stronger, and the rainfall greater, than on any other day in the year. The mean velocity of the wind was thirty-eight miles an hour; and the rainfall in twenty-four hours amounted to a little more than an inch and a half. The fall for the whole month was in Sussex, eight and a quarter inches; in Cumberland, nine and three-quarter inches; being, as regards the Sussex gauge, more than five inches above the average of the previous ten years. The total rainfall in eleven months, January to November, was thirty-three and one-third inches: a remarkable excess over twenty-eight inches, which is the usual average for the whole year. For those who are curious in comparisons we take a fact from the weather-records of New South Wales: at Newcastle in that colony there fell on March 18, 1871, more than ten and a half inches of rain in two hours and a half. Two official papers published in India further discuss the question‒sun-spots and rainfall. ‘The Cycle of Drought and Famine in Southern India,’ contains a statement of the argument by Dr W. W. Hunter, and the conclusions to which he has arrived. These are: ‘That although no uniform numerical relation can be detected between the relative number of sun-spots and the actual amount of rainfall, yet that the minimum period in the cycle of sun-spots is a period of regularly recurring and strongly marked drought in Southern India‒That apart from any solar theory, an examination of the rain registers shews that a period of deficient rainfall recurs in cycles of eleven years at Madras ... that the statistical evidence shews that the cycle of rainfall at Madras has a marked coincidence with a corresponding cycle of sun-spots ... and that the evidence tends also to shew that the average rainfall of the years of minimum rainfall in the said cycle approaches perilously near to the point of deficiency which causes famine.’ The average is, however, above that point; and though droughts and famines may recur in the cyclic years of minimum rainfall, the evidence, in Dr Hunter’s opinion, is insufficient to warrant the prediction of a regularly recurring famine.