members of the same family sharing a common fate,--but the remains of such as were destroyed could neither be identified nor separated. In one case a female foot was alone recognizable, while in others the bodies were calcined and and fused into an indistinguishable mass. The Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to inquire whether Admiral D'Urville, a distinguished French navigator, was among the victims. His body was thought to be found, but it was so terribly mutilated that it could be recognized only by a sculptor, who chanced some time before to have taken a phrenological cast of the skull. His wife and only son had perished with him. It is not easy now to conceive the excitement and dismay which this catastrophe caused throughout France. The railroad was at once associated in the minds of an excitable people with novel forms of imminent death. France had at best been laggard enough in its adoption of the new invention, and now it seemed for a time as if the Versailles disaster was to operate as a barrier in the way of all further railroad development. Persons availed themselves of the steam roads already constructed as rarely as possible, and then in fear and trembling, while steps were taken to substitute horse for steam power on other roads then in process of construction. The disaster was, indeed, one well calculated to make a deep impression on the popular mind, for it lacked almost no attribute of the dramatic and terrible. There were circumstances connected with it, too, which gave it a sort of moral significance,--contrasting so suddenly the joyous return from the country _fête_ in the pleasant afternoon of May, with what De Quincey has called the vision of sudden death. It contained a whole homily on the familiar text. As respects the number of those killed and injured, also, the Versailles accident has not often been surpassed; perhaps never in France. In this country it was surpassed on one occasion, among others, under circumstances very similar to it. This was the accident at Camphill station, about twelve miles from Philadelphia, on July 17, 1856, which befell an excursion train carrying some eleven hundred children, who had gone out on a Sunday-school picnic in charge of their teachers and friends.