The spiritual reaction of the colonies on the mother-land is much less considerable, yet is not nil. One or two instances stand out prominently. Jonathan Edwards is one of the giants of British as well as of American theology, and his treatise on the freedom of the will has counted for as much as Butler’s Analogy in the development of English theological thought. Sam Slick has been the father or foster-father of the portentous overgrowth of humor by which the United States balances the devouring activity of its public and the overstrain of its private life, but he has been practically inoperative on the very different quality of English humor. From South Africa have come influences of a sterner sort. “Who could have foreseen,” asks Mr. Stead, “that the new, and in many respects the most distinctive, note of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century would be sounded by a little chit of a girl reared in the solemn stillness of the Karoo, in the solitude of the African bush? The Cape has indeed done yeoman’s service to the English-speaking world. To that pivot of the empire we owe our most pronounced types of the imperial man and the emancipated woman”--Cecil Rhodes and Olive Schreiner. CAUSES OF DEGENERATION IN BLIND FISHES. BY PROFESSOR CARL H. EIGENMANN, INDIANA UNIVERSITY. It may now be profitable to take up the causes leading to the small degree of degeneration found in Chologaster, the degenerations of the eye in Amblyopsis, Typhlichthys and Troglichthys to a mere vestige, together with the total disappearance of some of the accessory structures of the eye, as the muscles. In the outset of this consideration we must guard against the almost universal supposition that animals depending on their eyes for food are or have been colonizing caves, or that the blind forms are the results of catastrophes that have happened to eyed forms depending on their eyesight for their existence. This idea, so prevalent, vitiates nearly everything that has been written on the degeneration of the eyes of cave animals. Another word of warning ought perhaps to be added. The process of degeneration found in the Amblyopsidæ need not necessarily be expected to be identical with the degeneration of the same organs in another group of animals, and, however much the conditions in one group may illuminate the conditions in another, cross-country conclusions must be guarded against. The degeneration of organs ontogenetically and phylogenetically has received a variety of explanations: 1. The organ diminishes with disuse (ontogenetic degeneration--Lamarck, Roux, Packard), and the effect of this disuse appears to some extent in the next generation (phylogenetic degeneration--Lamarck, Roux, Packard, Kohl).