—Sir John Kirk, who has been so well known for many years as Dr. Kirk, the British Representative and Consul General at Zanzibar, and who earned his knighthood by his services in connection with the abolition of the slave trade and the advance of civilization in East Africa, is now in England. * * * * * THE INDIANS. —A small congregation of full-blooded Chickasaw Indians lately gave $400 for Foreign Missions. —In the spring of 1881, seventeen Indian slaves at Sitka were freed through the efforts of Captain Henry Glass, of the United States ship Jamestown. —The Baptists have built a steam launch of 100 tons measurement for mission work in Alaska, British Columbia and Washington Territory. She is 82 feet long, with a cabin 25 x 15 feet. —The Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws and Seminole Indians, to the number of 60,560, have over 16,000 houses. During the years 1879 and 1880, from the 273,000 acres they have under cultivation they raised over half a million of bushels of wheat and 176,500 tons of hay. They have 195 schools with 6,250 scholars, or one-tenth of the population. For education during the year they expended $156,856, or $29.09 for each scholar, 2,650 of whom learned to read the same year. —At the Klawack Cannery, an Indian one day, abusing some others with offensive epithets learned from the whites, they at once fell to fighting. A trader inquiring what he said to them, they replied they didn’t know, only when white men used those words they went to fighting, and so the Indians thought that was the proper thing for them to do. * * * * * CHINESE. —The return of the Chinese students, about which so much is said, it seems was occasioned partly by the fact that the Chinese government wished to utilize their acquirements. Several of them have been called into the service of telegraph lines just completed, and others will enter the army, the navy and the arsenals. —The Japanese, the Yankees of the East, have lately been getting up a corner in silk, and European silk traders have been forced to accept the terms dictated by a syndicate of native growers. —There are now in North China about 100 villages where there are natives who have declared themselves disciples of Christ, and in as many as thirty centres they meet on Sunday for worship and the study of the Scriptures. —In Japan, 90 per cent. of the people are able to read. In the United States, only 80 per cent.; in England, 67; in China, 50, and in India 5 per cent. —China spends $150,000,000 annually in ancestral worship. —Japan has set an example that might well be followed by some continental nations. The government was requested for permission to hold a lottery in order to dispose of such articles as remained unsold at the national exhibition. They refused on moral grounds, and went to the expense of purchasing all the goods themselves in order to avoid the risk of an immoral example.