kind is hereditarily supplied with certain nervous connections wanting in the brain of other kinds. We need no more doubt the reality of the material distinction in the brain than we need doubt it in the limbs and jaws of the greyhound and the bull-dog. Those who have watched closely the different races of men can hardly hesitate to believe that something analogous exists in our own case. While the highest types are, as Mr. Herbert Spencer well puts it, to some extent 'organically moral' and structurally intelligent, the lowest types are congenitally deficient. A European child learns to read almost by nature (for Dogberry was essentially right after all), while a Negro child learns to read by painful personal experience. And savages brought to Europe and 'civilised' for years often return at last with joy to their native home, cast off their clothes and their outer veneering, and take once more to the only life for which their nervous organisation naturally fits them. 'What is bred in the bone,' says the wise old proverb, 'will out in the blood.' XX. _BLACKCOCK._ Just at the present moment the poor black grouse are generally having a hot time of it. After their quiet spring and summer they suddenly find their heath-clad wastes invaded by a strange epidemic of men, dogs, and hideous shooting implements; and being as yet but young and inexperienced, they are falling victims by the thousand to their youthful habit of clinging closely for protection to the treacherous reed-beds. A little later in the season, those of them that survive will have learned more wary ways: they will pack among the juniper thickets, and become as cautious on the approach of perfidious man as their cunning cousins, the red grouse of the Scottish moors. But so far youthful innocence prevails; no sentinels as yet are set to watch for the distant gleam of metal, and no foreshadowing of man's evil intent disturbs their minds as they feed in fancied security upon the dry seeds of the marsh plants in their favourite sedges.