It would be ill done, when I am anxious to acknowledge the pleasure and profit which I derived from my passage through the State, if I did not record the satisfaction with which I perused a volume of the "Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science," which by accident I picked up at one of the stations. The very name speaks trumpet-tongued for the progress which has been made in this wild region. The year before last, the twelfth annual meeting of the Academy was held in Topeka, and I find amongst the list of papers read such subjects as these:--The Kansas Lepidoptera; Kansas Minerals; the Mounds of Southern Kansas; Recent additions to Kansas Plants; Kansas Botany; Kansas Meteorites; Phonetic representations of Indian Language; Sinkholes; Elementary Sounds of Language; Mound-builders; On Recent Indian Discoveries. And among the lecturers there was Professor B. F. Mudge, who died last year, whose name probably is known to a very limited number of scientific men outside the University of Kansas. Generally the papers contributed by the gentlemen of the State attest industry and attainments which make their praise of the Professor particularly valuable. It is curious enough to pick up in a railway carriage, traversing such a scene of comparative wildness and vast uninhabited plains in Western Kansas, an exceedingly interesting examination of the Helmholtz theories of sight. The object of the lecturer would scarcely be suspected by the reader. We had already been struck by the extraordinary absence of signalmen, or of any of the complex apparatus of men and machinery which may be seen in Europe, and notably in England, to report the progress of trains on the lines. Collisions, however, occur in America where these precautions are not taken, and the lecturer attributed a good deal of these accidents to colour-blindness, which appears to have attracted considerable attention in the United States. Surgeons, pilots, &c., are tested for colour, and in the army colour-blindness disqualifies the recruit for employment in the signal corps. Altogether the papers give an impression that in this new State there are diligent students of natural history and physics, and profound inquirers into all the phenomena of life. There was a reverse to the medal.