The following is from a boy of thirteen :

I can drive horses and milk cows. . . . I was glad to read about George Clarke labouring among the Chinese, where Jesus was never heard of before. . . . . I am thankful to you for taking me to your Home in H—; when before you took me in, I was starving half the time, but when you took me I had all I could eat and drink, and a good bed to lie on.

In spite of these flourishing Reports of great moral transformations of character, it is an open secret that the Local Government Board are dissatisfied with the voluntary system of emigration as now carried on. They still complain that the inspection is wanting in frequency and efficiency; and if, as it would indeed seem, no improvement has been made in this direction since Mr. Doyle sent in his Report as to the emigration of pauper children to Canada, there are good and substantial grounds for complaint.

We have but little space left us to refer to the losses of our children outside the sphere of our immediate experience. A few brief words will, however, suffice to put our readers in possession of evidence sufficient to convince them that the workers in this hateful and abominable traffic are nowhere idle. In Ireland their whole system has lately been vigorously and effectively exposed in the columns of the Freeman's Journal. The thirty-seventh Report of the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics contains abundant proof of the proselytizing spirit of the workers. As is ever the custom, they are busy among the poor; the souls of the rich come not within their scope. There, money is useless and powerless. We learn from this Report that in the seventeen schools in Dublin and Kingstown, there are 493 Catholic children out of a total of 1,203, that their night-schools have 284 of our children, and that the rural schools, twenty-five in number, have 196 out of a total of 727. It is no matter of surprise to us that of their total income-£20,682 for 1885-only £2,407 was raised in Ireland; still less that the large balance comes mainly from England. We do hope, for the honour and good name of our fellow-countrymen, now that they know the use to which these funds are being put, they will endeavour-and they should have little difficulty in succeeding-to find worthier objects for their philanthropy.

To our Irish fellow-Catholics of Dublin we offer our hearty congratulations on the noble and self-sacrificing spirit they have shown in founding the society known as the City Children's Commission, and on the able and zealous way they have set to work to counteract the efforts of the proselytizers. This we can personally testify to, having had the pleasure and advan

tage of assisting at one of their quarterly meetings, and thus being enabled to gauge the results achieved.

We need only refer to Glasgow to find that the Catholic children of Scotland are in as great danger to their Faith as those of our own cities. "The Orphan Homes of Scotland," comprising some twenty-five buildings-non-inclusive of a City Home, the Working Boys' Home, the Children's Night Refuge; with an average annual income of £16,000, provide accommodation for close upon 1,000 boys and girls. They are under the superintendence of Mr. Quarrier, who emigrated last year 339 children. The Very Rev. Provost Munroe, D.D., in the pamphlet we have already quoted from, mentions that "in the year 1876 Mr. Quarrier gave a soirée in the hall of his home to 420 children. On that occasion clerks or agents noted down the name and age of every child on entering the hall, as declared by the children themselves; of these 420 children, 176 declared themselves to be Roman Catholics." In a letter to the writer dated November 7, 1886, the Very Rev. Provost says:

The proselytizing agencies are still growing in numbers, in energy, and in resources. They conduct their work still on the same lines as before, with this little difference, that occasionally a Catholic parent is told to apply to the priest to take the children, but to return should he not do so. To recruit the Homes, destitute parents present themselves with their children in large numbers. Debauchery, improvidence, drunkenness, and adultery fill them up still more extensively. Then there are many willing agents co-operating, whose zeal is stimulated by the thought that the Homes are rescuing souls from the thraldom of Popery. Among those is the large class of female Bible-readers, missionaries of all the different sects, lady visitors, &c. &c.; these all find frequent opportunities of sending or recommending Catholic waifs to the Homes.

And here we must bring our evidence to a close, and leave our case the case of the Lost, Strayed, and Stolen of the Poor Catholic Children-to the generous and sympathetic reflection and action of our readers.

We had three main objects in undertaking this article-two of which we hope we have attained-first, that of putting before them the ever-increasing numbers of our Catholic children who have escaped and are daily escaping our care and protection; secondly, the great and fearful success attendant upon the efforts of those who make it their whole and sole business of life to bring under their cruel and horrible influence the little ones we have allowed to drift away from us. For years and years this proselytizing propaganda has flourished, and the waifs and strays of ten and twelve years ago are now the fathers and mothers of children who should belong to us. Their numbers increase daily,

and the waifs and strays of to-day will, in their turn, rear and educate a family in a faith alien and antagonistic to that in which they themselves were baptized.

It would seem that we have grown slothfully callous to this state of things; that we have looked upon it as an evil beyond our powers of checking; that our hands are full, our resources insufficient to grapple with it. Our action for the last ten or twenty years has certainly been in accordance with this opinion. We have waxed eloquent and wrathful at times against the proselytizers, but neither our eloquence nor our wrath has helped to save a single soul from their clutches.

Face it we must, unless we are prepared to be the accomplices of those now waging this hateful war against our children. The cause needs no appeal; the horrid facts should be sufficient to rouse our energies, awaken our sympathies. We have to reproach ourselves with the loss of thousands and thousands of our children, hundreds of whom we could have saved had we possessed an organization capable of concerted action.

Our third and last object is to urge the Catholic body of this country to take this question up, to sift it thoroughly, to put on foot an organization which will be able, in some measure, to check and remedy the evil which is destroying so many of our little ones. No nobler cause exists, none more imperative, than that of helping, protecting, and rescuing the lost, strayed, and stolen of our Catholic poor children, who, ever powerless to help themselves, are left to seek protection, help, and comfort from the hands of those whose motto is, "Your soul first, bread and raiment afterwards.”

AUSTIN OATES.

Science Notices.

Ten Years' Progress in Astronomy.-Professor Young, the eminent astronomer, has just delivered a masterly lecture on the above subject before the New York Academy of Science. The record is not a brilliant one, but advance has been made of a solid although slow description. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the decade was the discovery of oxygen in the sun by Dr. Draper, of New York. The researches were most laborious and expensive, and the difficulty was increased by the element exhibiting itself in bright lines on a bright background. It was only natural that astronomers should show some hesitation in accepting an observation which implied much discrimination and a reversal of previously accepted theories. But Dr. Draper has gained the day, and has cleared up the difficulty that had hitherto appeared so anomalous, that the most abundant element of our globe should be unrepresented in the sun.

Mr. Lockyer's studies of the solar spectrum led him to propound his theory that many of the so-called elements in chemistry are not so in point of fact, but are dissociated in the fiery crucible of the sun. He found certain lines in the spectrum common to two or more metals; he was therefore led to conclude that these lines represented the elementary substance which was the base of the composition of these metals. He proposed for them the name of basic lines. In the meantime, the new diffraction spectrum had been carried to an extraordinary degree of perfection in America, with the result that the basic lines, which were supposed to represent an element, are now discovered to be groups of lines lying very closely together.

The corona of the sun has been most carefully studied during the late eclipses, and astronomers seemed to be agreed that it is no optical delusion, no conglomeration of meteorites, but a real solar appendage; an intensely luminous, but excessively attenuated cloud of mingled gas, fog, and dust surrounding the sun, formed and shaped by solar forces. It would appear that the corona is subject to great variations in shape and brilliancy, but we are unable to guess even what can be the cause of such variations.

Much discussion was aroused about the beginning of the decade as to the probable effect of the sun spots maxima and minima on the weather. A large number of observations have been made, especially in Germany, but we are not in a position to assert that any certain relation has yet been discovered. It will be safe to conclude that the solar disturbances exert a faint, but very faint, influence on terrestrial meteorology.

Before leaving the sun, we must refer to Professor Langley's invention of the bolometer, an instrument devised to register degrees of heat hitherto inappreciable. He has founded it on the well-known fact that metals, when heated, lose their power of conducting electricity. In the bolometer, a very fine slip of platinum wire is used, VOL. XVII.-NO. I. [Third Series.]

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and the most minute variations in temperature affect the currents of electricity as they pass along the wire, and the galvanometer is quick enough to announce the change. Professor Langley had the incredible energy and skill to transport his instruments to the summit of Mount Whitney, nearly 15,000 feet above the sea, there to pursue his researches in a pure, dry atmosphere, where terrestrial disturbances are reduced to a minimum. He obtained some wonderful results from his new instrument in his investigations into solar heat. Among other things, he has discovered that were the screen of the earth's atmosphere removed, and were we allowed to gaze on the unveiled surface, the colour of the sun would be found to be blue.

The honours in astronomy of late years have been taken mostly by Americans. Another great discovery which will make the past decade memorable was that of the two moons or satellites of Mars. This achievement fell to the telescope of Professor Hall, of Washington, and must be reckoned as one of the most brilliant discoveries of the day. The bodies themselves are the faintest specks of light, and can only be picked up by the keenest eyes with long telescopes. They are interesting, however, from more than one point of view. They bring strong confirmation to the very striking theory of Professor C. Darwin on Tidal Evolution.

Ancient Chronologies and Primitive Man.-Among the burning questions of the hour must be ranked the date of the appearance of man upon this planet. Many modern geologists, judging from the position of human remains in the caves and drifts, give primitive man an excessive antiquity. Lyell thinks 100,000 years the very least that can be given, while others maintain 250,000 to be the more likely figure. It is, of course, admitted that the chronologies as given in Genesis are liable to a good deal of uncertainty. The Hebrew and Septuagint differ very considerably in their figures. The Hebrew gives 2,023 years between Adam and the call of Abraham; for the same period the Septuagint has 3,389 years. Among the professed ecclesiastical chronologists there is a great divergence of opinion on this question. The age of the world is given in varying dates from 3,000 to 8,000 years. Beyond the latter figures no important Christian apologist has ventured to go. We cannot give very much weight to the evidence of geology. Geology can tell us of succession of different phenomena that have occurred on our globe, but the intervals that may have separated successions it does not and cannot have any means of verifying. The best geologists are ready to admit that to assign dates to any prehistoric fact is mere guesswork.

The Antiquity of Man from Ancient Monuments.-The Abbé Vigouroux, in the Revue des Questions Scientifiques, has devoted a careful study to the latest discoveries in the ancient monuments of Egypt, Assyria, and India. The early Jesuit missioners in China were early impressed with the very complete succession of emperors, dating back to the most remote times. They communicated their doubts and fears to their brethren in Europe, and the matter gave rise to some very lively discussion in the 17th and 18th centuries.