deacon Griffith, B. D.; S. R.; O. Thomas, D. D.; Ellis Wyn o Wyrfa; Thomas Aubrey; Dr. Fred Evans (Ednyfed); Monwyson; Richard Lumley; E. Wynne Parry, M. A., B. D.; Ap Vychan; Matthetes; Milo Griffith; Syr Osborne Morgan, M. P.; David Roberts, D. D.; Dean Vaughan; Cynddelw; J. Thomas, D. D.; Glasynys; B. Joseph (Myfyr); John Phillips, Bangor; T. Stephens; Dewi Wyn o Essyllt; Nathan Dyfed; John Evans (Eglwysbach), and many others. The It is not every day that book buyers pick up such a bargain as that which fell to the lot of a lucky Welshman at Pontypool the other day. For the munificent sum of 4d. a volume he had knocked down to him at an auction a complete set of the Gwyddoniadur Cymreig, in excellent condition! Gwyddoniadur consists of nine volumes, and is generally sold at eight guineas a set! This announcement will take the wind out of the sails of a wellknown East Glamorgan minister, who for two or three years past has aroused the envy of his ministerial brethren with the tale of how he obtained a copy of this Welsh encyclopaedia for ten shillings. The papermaking for Oxford Bibles is a specially important and interesting part of the work. At Wolvercote, a mile or two out of Oxford, the university has a large mill for the supply of its own requirements. A good deal of the paper they turn out here is made out of old ships' sails, the materials of which, after battling with storms in all quarters of the world, come here for the purpose of being made into paper, printed in almost every language under heaven, and bound up into volumes to be again scattered far and wide into all the uttermost ends of the earth. This Wolvercote paper mill has much to do with the great reputation that Oxford has acquired in the production of Bibles and other devotional books. Twenty years ago and more the management hit on a valuable invention in papermaking, and ever since their "India paper" has been the envy and the puzzle of manufacturers all over the kingdom. There are said to be only three persons living who know the secret of its make, and, though the process has never been legally protected, and all the world is free to imitate the extremely thin but thoroughly opaque and wonderfully strong and durable paper of the best Oxford Bibles if they only knew how, all the world has hitherto quite failed to do so. Literary pessimists are very fond of giving hopeless and remote prospects for the future of Welsh novelists. Yet, let the downcast in the ranks of aspirants for prose honors take heart, and remember that many English poets and authors have drawn largely from the springs of Welsh lore. Several of Sir Walter Scott's novels abound with traditions of Wales, and the "Bridal of Triermain" is of purely Welsh extraction. Then there are Southey's "Madoc," Gray's "Bard," Mason's "Druid's War Song," Tennyson's "Idylls," and Bulwer Lytton's "Harold," not to mention later stories, by living authors, which teem with Welsh lore, scenery, and description. HOW WORRY AFFECTS THE BRAIN. Modern science has brought to light rothing more curiously interesting than the fact that worry will kill. More remarkable still, it has been able to determine, from recent discoveries, just how worry does kill. It is believed by many scientists who have followed most carefully the growth of the science of brain diseases, that scores of the deaths set down to other causes are due to worry, and that alone. The theory is a simple oneso simple that any one can readily understand it. Briefly put, it amounts to this: Worry injures beyond repair certain cells of the brain; and the brain being the nutritive center of the body, the other organs become gradually injured, and when some disease of these organs, or a combination of them, arises, death finally ensues. 0:0 "Ugliness in Fiction" is discussed by Ian Maclaren in the current number of "Literature." He protests against "books which swear on every page, and do the other things on the page between. There are such things as drains," he says, "and sometimes they may have to be opened; but one would not for choice have one opened in his library." And again, "Why should the artist in life (the novelist) forsake the quest of the perfect and the beautiful, wrought out often through poverty and agony, and spend his skill on what is loathsome and disgusting? Is he not also bound to the service of the ideal, and is it not his function to fling out before us that model of high character and living which we all have imagined, after which we all strive, but which we can not express; or is it that the canon of beauty which guides the sculptor and the painter has no authority over the novelist, and he alone of artists has the liberty of deformity?" 0:0 PLUCKING GEESE ALIVE. It will be a surprise to a great many people who are getting their appetites ready for the savory Christmas goose to learn that the practice of plucking geese alive still obtains in some parts of the country, especially in Lincolnshire, England. Divers opinions are entertained with regard to the process. Some persons hold it to be cruel, while others think otherwise. The task is invariably allotted to a man who is known as a goose-puller. His mode of procedure is to say the least, effective. Having caught his goose, he tucks the head of the captured bird under his left arm, and forthwith proceeds to the laying-on of hands. The plucking is performed manner, in an expeditious and in a short time the bird is set free, shorn of feathers on breast, sides, back and top of the wings. The effect is not pleasing to the eye, and detracts from the beauty and symmetry of the bird. Its advantage, however, is said to be that by the time it is ready for the poulterers it has increased two pounds in weight. -0:0 NATURE AND SCIENCE. Cotton-seed waste, which a generation ago accumulated at the ginhouses, filled up the streams, rotted in the fields, and became an irritating nuisance, is now worth about thirty million dollars a year. Every bale of cotton leaves a legacy of half a ton of seed, which, it is said, brings the planter nearly as much as his cotton. The oil is used for finer grades of soap, as a substitute for lard, and is so near olive oil that an expert can hardly detect the difference. The hulls are fed to cattle, make an excellent fuel, are valuable as paper stock, and when burned, the ashes make a fertilizer which is most efficacious. It has recently been discovered that cottonseed oil, with the addition of eighteen per cent. of crude India rubber, makes an imitation which cannot be distinguished from the genuine rubber. Tacoma once had a mint that coined all the money in circulation where the City of Destiny now stands, and it did not require the fiat of Uncle Sam, the silver of Idaho, or the gold of California to make the pieces from Tacoma's mint pass current among the Indians, and the few hardy pioneers that were blazing the path of civilization through the forest on the shores of Commencement Bay. Back in the early seventies the Tacoma Mill Company, not being able to handily secure gold and silver for use in trading with and paying off the Indian laborers and early settlers, hit upon the novel plan of issuing their own currency, and to this end set their blacksmith at work to fashion for them, out of scraps of iron and brass, pieces of money, or rather tokens, which could be used as a circulating medium. The pieces consisted of 40 and 45 cent iron tokens and brass $1 pieces. The 40 cent pieces were about an inch in diameter, and the 45 cent pieces were about the size of the present silver half dollar. The $1 piece were oval in shape, about an inch and a quarter long, an inch wide, and a sixteenth of an inch in thickness. These pieces were stamped with the figures showing their value, and readily passed current all over the country tributary to the mill. 0:0 The economists and the statisticians are beginning to cry out in alarm. They calculate the population of the earth at different epochs, deduce the annual increase, and, going on from this, find by a simple example in proportion the number of persons that the world should contain at a given future date. This done, they estimate the area of ground necessary to support one man, and soon are able to assure us that in four hundred years the population of the globe will be SO dense that the earth can no longer nourish its inhabitants, and that hundreds of millions of human beings must die yearly of hunger. They nevertheless find a correction to this sad prophecy in the thought that the successors of M. Berthelot may have discovered by that time a means of manufacturing nutriment chemically. Bread, meat, vegetables will then be only a distant memory, and a dinner menu will be made up somewhat as follows: a small tablet of nitrogenous matter, pastilles of fatty material, a little sugar, and a bottle of seasoning-all pure and free from microbes. And then, when the nourishment of man is no longer a daily problem, when we are no longer forced to ask humbly of God our daily bread, the earth will become a vast garden watered by subterranean streams raised to the surface, and the human race will live in the legendary abundance of the Golden Age.-Cosmos. 0:0 MANY VERSUS ONE. Some curious reflections are induced by a consideration of the germ theory or diseases, which the learned author admits. When a brahmin of great holiness was shown the inhabitants of the water, which he had long been accustomed to drink, a powerful microscope being used to reveal them to his appreciative eye, he broke out into loud lamentations at the sin often repeated under which he lay of taking innumerable lives, all equally sacred according to his creed. An American can imagine the colleagues of His Highness Sir Bhagvat Sinh Jee once he has demonstrated to them the various bacilli, micrococci, microbes and other living and automobile things which may be vegetables, and then again may be animals. He falls sick of something which has a lot of wriggling specimens in it, like the comma bacillus which Dr. Koch discovered in Asiatic cholera. "If the attack be permitted to run its course, even to a fatal termination," the native scientist can be imagined as reasoning, "but a single life will have been lost; while, should we dose him, we shall have murdered all those innocent bacilli-and we have no desire to be pariah dogs in our next transmigration." The dilemma seems complete. 0:0 ABOUT SLEEP. It was at one time supposed that in sleep the brain was richly charged with blood. How that supposition can ever have arisen we confess we do not understand, but we assume that the theory was that a kind of paralysis overtook those who were wrapped in sleep. This is now confessed to be an error. Sleep ensues when the brain is largely denuded of blood, when cerebral anaemia is established. To partly empty the brain of its blood-supply, to keep the head cool, the body sufficiently warm, and to send the blood rather to the lower extremities-this is the physical problem of the sleepless. It is interesting to note that during sleep a great number of the bodily functions continue quite normally without interfering with sleep itself, and therefore sleep is not so like death as some of the poets have imagined. Man asleep is not so profoundly different from man awake; the two chief points of difference, however, being these, a greater indrawing of oxygen and exhalation of carbonic acid, and a complete vasomotor rest. The bedroom and the state of the occupant (assuming the absence of external noise) are the chief factors in the problem. The sleepingroom should be airy and cool, never, for adult persons, reaching a higher temperature than 60 deg., though young children need greater warmth. The head should never be under the sheets, but exposed and cool. The feet should be kept warm by a little extra clothing at the foot. With a heavy sleeper there should be no thick curtains, but with a light sleeper curtains are essential, as sunlight plays upon the optic nerve, and rouses that attention which it is the one object of the sleeper to keep in suspended animation. The bed should never be between fireplace and door, or it catches the drafts, and it is more dangerous and more easy to contract a chill in bed than in the daytime, the specially chilly period being about 3 A. M-Spectator. ministers in Several Nonconformist England and Wales, it is reported, have recently received circulars offering to confer American degrees upon them at the following prices: D. D., 21p.; LL.D., 20p.; Ph. D., 16p.; M. A., 12p.; B. A., 10p.; Mus Bac, 10p.; Mus. Doc., 16p.; B. Sc., 10p.; B. D., 10p. It is very often the case that teachers forget their own lessons, preachers their own exhortations, and even bishops need to be reminded of the cardinal truths of the gospel. Some time ago Bishop Owen's coachman forgot to light his carriage lamps, and while driving his lordship home was arrested by a policeman. Not only was the coachman inexcusable, but the Bishop should have enforced the old saying at the threshhold of Biblical studies, "Let there be light!" Doing evil, we are not under grace, while there is a cop around! As regards the small holdings in Wales proper, there are 1,095 of one acre, and 12,179 under one acre, a total of one acre and under of 13,274. From one to five acres, there are 35,633, from five acres to 20 acres 211,267, from 20 acres to 50 acres 423,757, and from 50 acres to 100 acres 749,465, from 100 acres to 300 acres 1,238,569, from 300 acres to 500 acres 142,925, from 500 acres to 1,000 acres 32,188, and above 1,000 acres 3,925. The total number of holdings in Wales is 2,838,359. The largest number by far are those holdings from 100 to 300 acres, which really represent the pastoral farms of Wales. "It is surprising," says a writer in "Young Wales," "how little fruit-growing is cultivated in the Principality. The orcharding in the twelve counties, according to latest returns, amounts to only 3,677 acres. Anglesey is the least with 12 acres, and Breconshire highest with 1,215 acres. Small fruit is grown upon 1,215 acres. Radnorshire is the least with 6 acres, and Denbighshire highest with 557 acres. And as regards market gardens, there is a total of 1,520 acres, the lowest being Anglesey with 7 acres, and the highest being Denbigh and Glamorgan with 605 and 614 acres, respectively." In the following picture by the late Rev. Kilsby Jones we have the true philosophy of life and health. Nature is as necessary to our bodies as grace to our souls. "Our progenitors," says he, enjoyed many advantages. They inspired the purest oxygen from morning to night, and from night to morning, for their houses were far enough from being air-tight. Plain and coarse as their fare undoubtedly was, they who lived on it were enviable pictures of rude robust health. The arms of the servant girls which did their share of field work, were always bare except on |