sale; when a husband puts away his wife, giving her a bill of divorce, he marks the document with his entire palm; and when a wife is sold, the purchaser requires the seller to stamp the paper with hands and feet, the four organs duly smeared with ink. Professional fortune tellers in China take into account almost the entire system of the person whose future they attempt to forecast, and of course they include palmistry, but the rugæ of the finger-ends do not receive much attention. Amateur fortune-tellers, however, discourse as glibly on them as phrenologists do of "bumps"--it is so easy. In children the relative number of volute and conical striæ indicate their future. "If there are nine volutes," says a proverb, "to one conical, the boy will attain distinction without toil." Regarded from an ethnological point of view, I can discover merely that the rugæ of Chinamen's fingers differ from Europeans', but there is so little uniformity observable that they form no basis for distinction, and while the striæ may be noteworthy points in certain medico-legal questions, heredity is not one of them. * * * * * LUCIDITY. At the close of an interesting address lately delivered at the reopening of the Liverpool University College and School of Medicine, Mr. Matthew Arnold said if there was one word which he should like to plant in the memories of his audience, and to leave sticking there after he had gone, it was the word _lucidity_. If he had to fix upon the three great wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and salutary lesson for men to learn than that a quality may be accompanied, naturally perhaps, by grave dangers; that it may actually present itself accompanied by terrible defects, and yet that it might itself be indispensable. Let him illustrate what he meant by an example, the force of which they would all readily feel. Seriousness was a quality of our nation. Perhaps seriousness was always accompanied by certain dangers. But, at any rate, many of our French neighbors would say that they found our seriousness accompanied by so many false ideas, so much prejudice, so much that was disagreeable, that it could not have the value which we attributed to it. And yet we knew that it was invaluable. Let them follow the same mode of reasoning as to the quality of lucidity. The French had a national turn for lucidity as we had a national turn for seriousness. Perhaps a national turn for lucidity carried with it always certain dangers.