“Look now towards Heaven,” we read in the Scriptures, “and tell the stars if thou be able to number them.” Many observers, however, including the two Herschels, have made the attempt. The stars visible to the naked eye are only a fraction of the whole, but according to the estimate of the distinguished German astronomer, Argeland, the number seen by the unaided vision in the latitude of Berlin is 3,256, and for the whole heavens may be put at about 5,000. Another German astronomer makes out the naked-eye stars in the whole heavens to be about 6,800. When the telescope is introduced the number is enormously increased. The larger the telescope the more stars we see. The number has been run up by authorities worthy of respect to as high as twenty million stars, and more, within the grasp of an 18-inch reflector! Some girls, in answering this question, mentioned that there was an International Photographic Survey of the Heavens now going on which is sure to throw light on this interesting problem. =60. What English Earl once got a box on the ear from a great Queen?= All competitors were right who said that the receiver of this royal box was the Earl of Essex, and the giver Queen Elizabeth. It was on an occasion when the two had begun to dispute on the subject of an assistant in the affairs of Ireland, to which the earl was going as Lord Deputy. The dispute ended in the earl’s receiving from her majesty a box on the ear, with, we are told, the encouraging addition of “Go and be hanged!” The fall of Essex is generally dated from this circumstance, and it is thought that he never forgave it. =61. Is what is known as the poisonous upas tree of Java a fact or a hoax?= It was right to say that it is partly the one and partly the other; about an ounce of fact, however, to a pound of hoax. The name upas—a Javanese word meaning poison—is given by the Malays and people of Western Java to the poison obtained from the gum of a tree that used to be employed in Celebes to envenom the bamboo shafts of the natives. The famous description of the upas tree, with its effluvia killing all things near it, is a pure fiction, the invention of George Stevens, the Shakespearean commentator, who seems to have had a special turn for mystifying and befooling the public. According to him the tree destroyed all animal life within a radius of fifteen miles or more, and when the poison was wanted it was fetched by condemned criminals, of whom scarcely two out of twenty ever returned. Several girls mentioned that the upas tree is to be met with in botanic gardens in this country and, says one, “not doing a halfpennyworth of harm to anybody.” =62. What is the best way of treating a fainting fit?=