reviews are almost invariably anonymous, whereas in France the weight attached to these is proportioned to the repute of the name by which they are signed. In order to give some idea of the daily output of the newspaper press in London alone the following instance may be given:--On Monday, February 13, 1893, Mr. Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons. On the following morning there were despatched from a single establishment, that of W. H. Smith and Son, 374,218 newspapers, weighing upwards of 44 tons. [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Eyre & Spottiswoode._ CENTRAL PARCELS POST OFFICE, MOUNT PLEASANT. This spacious but unimposing building occupies the site on which, a few years ago, stood the Clerkenwell House of Correction. Parcel postage was first introduced on August 1, 1883, and the number of parcels forwarded between post offices in the United Kingdom during the succeeding twelve months was about 25,000,000. During twelve months of 1895-96 the number of "inland" parcels despatched reached the enormous total of 60,500,000.] [Illustration: _L. Tuxen._} {_From the Royal Collection._ THE MARRIAGE OF THE CZAR OF RUSSIA TO PRINCESS ALIX OF HESSE, GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN, AT ST. PETERSBURG, November 26, 1894.] [Sidenote: The Advance of Natural Science.] It would be impossible within due limits to pass in review, even in the most sketchy fashion, the advance made in natural science, especially as each province of the whole realm of knowledge has become divided and sub-divided into sections, each the peculiar department of specialists. Three hundred years ago it was possible for Francis Bacon to survey the entire firmament of human understanding, but in the nineteenth century the task accomplished in the _Advancement of Learning_ and the _Novum Organum_ has developed to a scale only to be compassed in such a prodigious publication as the "Encyclopædia Britannica," of which the latest edition consists of twenty-five volumes in quarto, containing upwards of 20,750 pages printed in double columns, contributed by no less than 1,200 different writers, besides translators and revisers. [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by R. Milne, Aboyne._ HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, THE PRINCE OF WALES, THE CZAR AND CZARINA AND THEIR INFANT DAUGHTER. Photographed at Balmoral, November 1896.] [Sidenote: Surgery and Medicine.]