As flies are said to eat the animalcules in impure air, thus removing the seeds of disease, leanness in a fly is _primâ facie_ evidence of pure air in a house, while corpulency indicates foul wall-paper and bad ventilation. Talking of a foul and fresh atmosphere, there has lately been adopted in India a novel method of giving change of air to people who cannot afford to leave home. Patients go up in a balloon, which ascends to a certain height, and is there made captive. It seems that a few days passed in this atmosphere, which is quite different from that on the plains beneath, temporarily braces up the most languid of invalids. The importance to health of a free perspiration no less than of fresh air, and what dangers arise from perspiration being suddenly checked, has been proved by the fact that a person covered completely with a compound, impervious to moisture, will not live over six hours. On the occasion of some papal ceremonies, a poor child was once gilded all over with varnish and gold-leaf to represent the Golden Age. No wonder that it died in a few hours, when we consider that the amount of liquid matter which passes through the pores of the skin in twenty-four hours in an adult person of sound health, is about sixteen fluid ounces, or one pint. Besides this, a large amount of carbonic acid—a gaseous body—passes through the tubes; so we cannot fail to see the importance of keeping them in perfect working order by frequent ablutions or other means. It has often been stated that ocular weakness and diseases in various forms appear to have been rapidly increasing in recent times. Dr Loring, in discussing before the New York County Medical Society the serious question, ‘Is the human eye gradually changing its form under the influence of modern civilisation?’ confirms the opinion, so far at least as short-sightedness is concerned. Constant study, now incidental to the lives of so many, has, he says, a tendency to engender this derangement of the eye, and it is often transmitted to descendants. In his opinion, near-sightedness is a disease of childhood, and rarely develops itself after the fifteenth or eighteenth year. On examining the eyes of over two thousand scholars in the New York public schools, Dr Loring found that the proportion of those in a healthy condition were eighty-seven per cent. among children under seven years, while between that age and twenty-one, the proportion of normal eyes was but sixty-one; which shews, he thinks, that near-sightedness increases directly with the age to which schooling is extended. In Königsberg, Germany, he found considerably more than half the population were short-sighted; and in America it is more commonly met with among the older eastern cities than the new ones of the west. Among the most prominent causes of the disease are, in his opinion, a sedentary life, poor food, bad ventilation, and general disregard of hygienic requirements—all conducing to a laxity of tissue, of which