at once protested, Portugal admitted the illegality of her act and consented to refer the amount of compensation to the decision of three Swiss jurists. This was in 1890, when Portugal paid £28,000 on account. It was not until the 29th of March 1900 that the award was made known. The arbitrators ordered Portugal to pay--in addition to the £28,000--a sum, including interest, of £950,000. The damages were promptly paid. Meantime the railway had been continued from Komati Poort and was opened for through traffic to Pretoria on the 8th of July 1895. In 1906-1910 another railway (47 m. long) was built from Lourenço Marques due west to the Swaziland frontier, being a link in a new line to shorten the distance by rail between the Rand and the sea by some 60 m. See also DELAGOA BAY and the authorities there cited. The text of the railway arbitration award was published in French at Berne in 1900. Annual reports on the trade of Lourenço Marques are issued by the British Foreign Office. LOUSE (O. Eng. _lús_, cf. Du. _luis_, Ger. _Laus_, Dan. and Swed. _lus_), a term applied to small wingless insects, parasitic upon birds and mammals, and belonging strictly speaking to the order Anoplura, often included among the Hemiptera, though the term is frequently extended to the bird-lice constituting the suborder Mallophaga, formerly included among the Neuroptera. Both agree in having nothing that can be termed a metamorphosis; they are active from the time of their exit from the egg to their death, gradually increasing in size, and undergoing several moults or changes of skin. The true lice (or Anoplura) are found on the bodies of many Mammalia, and occasion by their presence intolerable irritation. The number of genera is few. Two species of _Pediculus_ are found on the human body, and are known ordinarily as the head-louse (_P. capitis_) and the body-louse (_P. vestimenti_); _P. capitis_ is found on the head, especially of children. The eggs, laid on the hairs, and known as "nits," hatch in about eight days, and the lice are full grown in about a month. Such is their fecundity that it has been asserted that one female (probably of _P. vestimenti_) may in eight weeks produce five thousand descendants. Want of cleanliness favours their multiplication in a high degree--the idea once existed, and is probably still held by the very ignorant, that they are directly engendered from dirt. The irritation is caused by the rostrum of the insect being inserted into the skin, from which the blood is rapidly pumped up. A third human louse, known as the crab-louse (_Phthirius pubis_) is found amongst the hairs on other parts of the body, particularly those of the pubic region, but probably never on the head. The louse of monkeys is now generally considered as forming a separate genus (_Pedicinus_), but the greater part of those infesting domestic and wild quadrupeds are mostly grouped in the large genus