A communication to the Royal Institute of British Architects by Mr Penrose makes known certain important ‘improvements in paint materials invented by Mr W. Noy Wilkins,’ which have been satisfactorily tested in the decoration of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the words of Mr Penrose, ‘The results arrived at are of such extreme simplicity as to make their general application extremely easy, and also to give a strong _a priori_ conviction of their permanence. In the matter of pigments, white-lead is entirely banished from the painter’s stock, and the substitution of kaolin, mixed with a smaller proportion of zinc-white, combined with the limitation of the palette to the mineral colours. Mr Wilkins has practised for twenty-five years exclusively with these materials.... His discovery is that the chemical driers, which produce a very unfavourable effect upon painter’s work, whether of the house-painter or the artist, causing it to darken and to crack, can be entirely dispensed with, by simply boiling for a short time a small quantity of Turkey umber in the oil to be used for painting—whether linseed, poppy, or nut oil—producing as desired a drying painting oil or a varnish, and the residuum forming a valuable oil cement.’ Mr Wilkins permits cultivators of art, desirous of more particulars, to address him at ‘The Cottage, Elm Grove, Peckham’ (London). In another communication, by Mr I’Anson, on the Architecture of Norway, the wooden churches were of course mentioned, and something was said about Norwegian timber which will bear repetition. ‘The Scotch fir furnishes the red wood, and the spruce-fir the white. What strikes one,’ said the speaker, ‘is, that the Scotch fir, which with us is regarded as the least valuable kind of fir-wood, scarcely fit for railway sleepers or fences, is the best fir in Norway. I account for that superiority of the Norwegian over the English tree in some measure by the greater length of time that Scotch fir takes to come to maturity in Norway than in this country. Scotch fir grows at the rate of as much as two feet a year in Britain, and takes about fifty years to become a usable tree; whereas in Norway it would take probably a century to grow to a tree of equal size.’ In the last annual Report of the Royal Asiatic Society it is stated as a now nearly accepted fact, that the language of Madagascar is a Malay language from Sumatra, and that its connection with the African Suahili is only that of loan-words, just as Persian has borrowed largely from Arabic. Philologists and others interested in Eastern Africa will perhaps be glad to hear that a grammar of Malagasi has been recently published. Plantations of the cinchona tree were first begun in Jamaica in 1860, at the cost of the government. The experiment has proved so successful that more than eighty thousand trees are now growing in different parts of the island. Henceforth the West Indies will compete with India in supplying the world with quinine.