itchard has succeeded, as he thinks, in reading the
infinitesimal figures on the milestone of the star 61 Cygni. He gives
the distance as fifty billions of miles, and reminds us that this star
is probably the nearest to us of all the bodies in space outside our
own planetary system.--_Home Journal_.

A NEW BASIS FOR CHEMISTRY has been published by Thos. Sterry Hunt, 165
pages, price, $2. Prof. Hunt dispenses entirely with the atomic
theory, but that does not make the mystery of definite combinations
any clearer. It is only "confusion worse confounded."

CHLOROFORM IN HYDROPHOBIA.--Dr. V. G. Miller, an old army surgeon of
Osage Mission, Kansas, says that he once treated a terrible case of
hydrophobia with chloroform, using altogether about three pounds. It
conquered the spasms. A slimy, stringy secretion ran out of the man's
mouth which probably carried off the poison, and for a long time he
could not swallow, but in three weeks he entirely recovered. The
salivary glands seem to have a close relation to hydrophobia. Many
years ago reports were published from Russia on the authority of M.
Marochetti, a hospital surgeon, of the cure of hydrophobia, by
piercing with a red hot needle certain swellings that rose under the
tongue, and giving a decoction of broom. Dr. M. said that fourteen
were cured in this manner. This discovery seems to have been
forgotten.

THE WATER QUESTION.--"It may naturally be asked, If Brooklyn has been
so successfully supplied with water from driven wells, why has not New
York adopted the same system? In answer to this it must be remembered
that the drive-well is a new invention, and, before its application to
Brooklyn, had only been used on a small scale. To this day no one can
give satisfactory reasons why the water flows continuously from the
earth through the pipe of a driven-well. Hence, to the public
generally, this mode of obtaining water was new and little understood.
At the time of its introduction to Brooklyn a water-famine was
threatened. All the ordinary sources of supply had been exhausted by
the ever-increasing population, and the authorities were puzzled what
to do. In this extremity Andrews & Bro., a firm which had much
experience in working drive-wells, offered _at their own expense_, to
put down wells and supply the town with water. Had Andrews & Co.
merely proposed to put down the wells and the town to pay the bill and
run the risk of failure, the proposition would not hav