"I am but a _Gatherer_ and disposer of other men's stuff."--Wotton. * * * * * INSANITY. A French physician, in a recent work on the moral and physical causes of insanity, noticing the influence of professions in promoting this affliction, brings forward a curious table, showing the relative proportion of different professions in a mass of 164 lunatics. It runs thus:--merchants, 50; military men, 33; students, 25; administrateurs et employes, 21; advocates, notaries, and men of business, 10; artists, 8; chemists, 4; medical practitioners, 4; farmers, 4; sailors, 3; engineers, 2. Total 164. Never were the afflictions of Insanity more vividly portrayed than in the following lines from _Churchill's Epistle to Hogarth_:-- Sure 'tis a curse which angry fates impose, To mortify man's arrogance, that those Who're fashioned of some better sort of clay, Must sooner than the common herd decay. What bitter pangs must humble genius feel, In their last hour to view a Swift and Steele! How must ill-boding horrors fill their breast, When she beholds men, mark'd above the rest For qualities most dear, plung'd from that height, And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night! Are men indeed such things? and are the best More subject to this evil than the rest, To drivel out whole years of idiot breath, And sit the monuments of living death? O galling circumstance to human pride! Abasing thought! but not to be deny'd. With curious art, the brain too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought. Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots out her pow'rs and leaves a blank behind. * * * * * MACADAMIZATION. The cost of converting Regent-street, Whitehall-place, and Palace-yard, into broken stone roads, has been L 6,055 8_s_. 3_d_. Value of old pavement taken up and broken for that purpose L 6,787 7_s_. 0_d_. ------------ L12,842 15 3 ------------ _Parliamentary Papers._ * * * * * SILK According to a late statement of Mr. Huskisson, the silk manufacture of England now reaches the enormous amount of fourteen millions sterling per annum, and is consequently after cotton, the greatest staple of the country. * * * * * NEW LAMP. At a recent meeting of the Royal Institution an ornamental lamp was placed on the library table, the elegant transparent paintings and spiral devices of which were kept in rotary motion by the action of the current of heated air issuing from the chimneys of the lamp, which contrivance is well adapted to a number of purposes of ornamental illumination. * * * * *