Last year a Gas and Water Bill was carried through Parliament, involving an expenditure of something like £80,000, and at least double taxation. We have no doubt whatever very good and satisfactory reasons will be given for this large expenditure, but hitherto not the slightest explanation has been vouchsafed to the public, and we are, in common with five-sixths of the community, at present quite ignorant of the reasons given for this enormous expenditure: that there must be unanswerable reasons we have no doubt whatever, for have not the Council been unanimous to a man throughout. Not a single protest was entered. Not a single speech was publicly made against it. But more wonderful still, not a single speech was made publicly in the Council in its favour. This did not arise from want of debating power on the part of the members. It must have arisen from the unanswerable nature of the arguments delivered in private committees, where, practically, no one heard them, or of them, except the members themselves. The only objection which can be raised to this theory is, that if the matter is so very clear and simple, and the expenditure so imperatively called for, it is most wonderful that some ingenuous simple-minded member had not thought of making himself popular at one bound, by giving a little information to the public as the matter proceeded, and so silence all the grumbling and general dissatisfaction felt outside. * * * * * THE Gaelic Society of Inverness entered on its fifth session last month. The Society has of late shown considerable signs of popularity and progress; for close upon fifty members have been added to the roll during the first eight months of the Society's year, while only eighteen were added during the whole of the previous one. In 1873, seventy new members were elected. The following five Clans are the best represented—Mackenzies, 23 members; Frasers, 22; Mackays, 19; Macdonalds, 18; Mackintoshes, 14. This is not as it should be; for while the Mackays only occupy a little over a page of the Inverness Directory, the Mackintoshes two, and the Mackenzies about three and a-half; the Macdonalds occupy over four, and the Frasers seven pages. We would like to see the Clans taking their proper places, by the "levelling-up" process of course. * * * * * WE regret to announce the sudden death, on the 19th of August, of Dr Hermann Ebel, Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Berlin. He superintended the new edition of Zeuss's _Grammatica Celtica_, and was one of the four or five leading Celtic scholars of the age. * * * * *