beings have been starved out of existence, and the same area of ground which once supported a flourishing village, at present almost fails to satisfy the hunger of a small family. For we must not forget that modern industry has devised methods of subsistence undreamed of by the nations of antiquity, and that the religion of resignation has taught millions to endure degrees of wretchedness which nine out of ten pagans would have refused to prefer to the alternative of self-destruction. A whole tenement of priest-ridden lazaronis now contrive to eke out a subsistence on a pittance which a citizen of ancient Rome would have been too proud to ask a woman to share; yet with all their talent for surviving under conditions of soul and body degrading distress, only eight children of the Mediterranean coastlands can now wring a sickly subsistence from the same area of soil which once sufficed to supply twenty-nine men with all the blessings of health and abundance. E.—REFORM. The discovery of two new continents has respited the doomed nations of the Old World, but the rapid colonization of those land supplements will soon reduce mankind to the alternative of tree-culture or emigration to the charity-farm of the New Jerusalem. In the words of a great German naturalist, “We shall have to work the world over again.” On a small scale the practicability of that plan has already been conclusively demonstrated. By tree-culture alone arid sand-wastes have been restored to something like tolerable fertility, if not to anything approaching their pristine productiveness. In the lower valley of the Nile (the ancient Thebaïd) Ibrahim Pasha set out thirty-five million Circassian forest-trees, of which one-third at least took root, and by their growth not only reclaimed the sterility of the soil but increased the average annual rainfall from four to fifteen inches. In the Landes of western France a large tract of land has been reclaimed from the inroads of the coast sand by lining the dunes with a thick belt of trees, and some fifteen hundred square miles of once worthless fields have thus been restored to a high degree of productiveness. In the Austrian Karst, a sterile plateau of limestone cliffs and caves has been dotted with groves till the valleys have been refreshed with the water of resuscitated springs; and pasture-lands, long too impoverished even for the sustenance of mountain goats, once more are covered with herds of thriving cattle.