* * * * * BENEFACTIONS. —Mr. Haskell, editor of the Boston _Herald_, has subscribed $1,000 to Bates College. —Mr. John P. Howard has given $28,000 to the University of Vermont, for rebuilding its main edifice. —Amherst College is to receive about $50,000 for its library from the estate of the late Joel Stiles, of Boston. —Mr. C. H. McCormick has added $50,000 to his already liberal gifts to the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest. —The Boston University has come into possession of the $2,000,000 estate bequeathed to the institution ten years ago by Isaac Rich, of Boston. —The will of the late Cornelius Sweetser bequeathed $10,000 to the Thomaston Academy, the income of $15,000 for public and school libraries, $5,000 for a Sweetser school fund, and $12,000 to the York Institute. —St. Johnsbury Academy has received from Thaddeus Fairbanks an additional $40,000 as a permanent fund. To this a gift of $50,000 is added from the estate of Governor Erastus Fairbanks, making, with sums otherwise secured, an endowment fund of $100,000. —_The Executive Committee of the A. M. A. reported at its annual meeting that $15,000 were needed for a Boy’s Dormitory at Straight University, New Orleans, La. One individual offers $5,000 of this amount on condition that the remaining $10,000 be secured._ * * * * * A volume of 420 pages, entitled “Missionary Papers,” by Rev. John C. Lowrie, D.D., is the work of a man well qualified to write on a broad range of missionary topics. Dr. Lowrie was once a missionary in India, and for many years has been the senior Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. These papers are, therefore, the results of extended observation and of long and varied experience. They, like their author, are not sensational, but scholarly and practical. We subjoin a quotation from the paper on “Less Favored Races.”