ACCORDING to the Washington "Gazette," the paint makers are grinding up Egyptian mummies for the fine brown color which they make when powdered. This color is due to the asphaltum with which the cloths wrapped around the mummies was impregnated. THE Washington monument is probably doomed. In its present condition it is a grievous eyesore in the Washington landscape, and a board of army engineers now say that its foundations are not strong enough to permit raising the shaft higher, and it is proposed to take it down. MR. H. BYASSON has produced a kind of petroleum by the mutual action of steam, carbonic acid, and sulphuretted hydrogen in presence of iron at a white heat. All these substances are known to be contained in the rocks of the earth's crust, which also has at various times afforded the necessary heat. GOLD, though the principal standard of value, is not moved about the world much. The entire import of London, the greatest banking city in the world, was only $116,222,350 in 1876, and the export was $81,097,850. Nearly the whole of the difference went into the vaults of the Bank of England, the stock of which increased $34,992,020. PROF. HAWES has proved the existence of metallic iron in the basalt dykes of New Hampshire. It exists as small specks in the centre of grains of magnetite. This contradicts the theory that the metallic iron of the dykes is the result of carbon acting upon the magnetite in them, and proves that the iron is the primary and the magnetite the secondary product. THOUGH agricultural professorships are not considered to have produced all the good that was once expected from them, there is one lately established by the French Government which might well be copied in other countries. It is a professorship of comparative agriculture at Vincennes, and its occupant will make a systematic comparison of home and foreign agriculture. THE character of the Yale lectures to mechanics is seen from the following titles to some of the lectures: "Forester and Forest Products," Prof. William H. Brewer; "Mosses," Prof. C. D. Eaton; "Our Red Sandstone," G. W. Hawes; "The Usury Laws," Prof. F. A. Walker; and "Sanitary Engineering," Prof. W. P. Trowbridge. The course contains thirteen lectures, and costs $1. A FRENCH paper says that "an American company proposes to introduce fur seals from Alaska into Lake Superior! The temperature of the lake is considered to be sufficiently cold for the purpose, and the company hopes to obtain from Congress and the Canadian Parliament an act protecting the creatures from slaughter for twenty years, after which time it is supposed that they will be sufficiently acclimatized and numerous to form subjects of sport." As the fur seal is a marine animal and Lake Superior is a body of fresh water, the success of the experiment, and even the authenticity of the story, is at least doubtful!