been paid up to the legal margin-that is, three-fourths of the amount ---and the [new shareholders to pay up not less than fifty per cent. of the amount of their shares.

"With such a law, a true law of limited liability, bubble-blowing would be impossible. Stupid provincials could not be imposed upon by big figures and with the idea that they were going to buy a share worth £20 for £1. Companies could not be launched without bona fide shareholders, with the intention of rigging the market, because not less than one-third of the nominal capital must be deposited, and the bubble-blowers are never able to find ready money. Nor would this plan stop any honest enterprise. If a small capital is wanted to start the business, why should a large capital be put at the top of the prospectus?

"There are one or two other amendments of the law which I think desirable. Every share should be registered and stamped at a Government office; for without that precaution shares might be issued in excess of the legal number. But the main point is to have genuine limited liability, which I believe my plan would secure. Then there wo ud be no anxiety about a mania for public companies, because they could not be launched upon credit only, and in excess of the available capital of the country. The risk being really limited, people who now hold aloof and go into Consols or mortgages only, would invest in joint-stock shares. There would be very few cases of winding-up, and when they did occur, the unfortunate shareholders would not be utterly ruined. The Minister who introduces such a law as I have sketched will increase the public wealth, decrease the public burdens, and put an end to a system by which so many thousands of homes are made desolate.

will

"Now, my dear fellow, I have finished my lecture, and if you take no more claret we will adjourn to the snuggery for a cigar. I don't mind smoking in a bed-room or a drawing-room, but it is detestable in a dining-room.

"Well, you have a chance. Agitate for a just, wise, and real law of limited liability, and you will become one of the most popular men in the country. And in this sensible age popularity pays."

JOHN BAKER HOPKINS.

TABLE TALK.

BY SYLVANUS URBAN, GENTLEMAN.

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It is a relief to find Serjeant Cox declaring that a careful and patient investigation of the phenomena of "psychic force" has satisfied him that those phenomena are 'purely physical, wholly a property within the domain of science," and that "all the conditions of their production negative the theory of spiritualism." But is not this announcement of the learned Serjeant's an instance of petitio principii ? If "psychic force" means anything, it is something different from "spiritualism." It is an exercise of the functions of the human intelligence and will in a manner not hitherto recognised by scientific psychologists. Then why tell us that he has satisfied himself that the phenomena of psychic force are not the phenomena of spiritualism? The question arises, did Serjeant Cox intend to investigate "psychic force," or did he go simply to see if he could make anything out of the phenomena which are put forward as spiritualistic, and which are not yet recognised by scientific authorities as really novel or peculiar? And when Serjeant Cox says that the conditions of the production of these phenomena negative the theory of spiritualism, is he not, as a student of science, granting too much to the so-called theory? What is the theory of spiritualism? It is a pretence that what are called spirits make noises and move objects. Now to the scientific man, no such phenomena are possible. Noises and movements are physical effects. They are the results of concussion and of pressure, and only physical substances, possessing weight and powers of resistance, can do these things. When we hear a rap on a table we ought to know what, besides the table, made the noise. Science has not yet carried us so far, but by and by it will be able to tell us whether the rap was caused by a piece of iron, or wood, or bone, or whatever substance, and will also inform us of the amount of force exercised. It is purely a physical problem. We can understand invisible physical substances causing concussions and movements; but it is essential that they should be physical substances, and therefore not spirits. If the word "spirit" is to be allowed to have a definite meaning, then a spirit is a thing that of itself could not manage to make a noise or move an object.

THE little folks presently coming home for the holidays will thank me for informing them that we have entered upon a spell of eleven years during which Christmas Day will not fall on a Sunday. It was to the juvenile mind an unwelcome mischance of the year 1870 that the twentyfifth of December should have chosen the Sabbath for its anniversary. The same thing occurred six years before, in 1864, and five years before VOL. VII., N.S. 1871.

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that, in 1859, and at an interval again of six years, in 1853. The irregular regularity of the incidence of Christmas Day upon the Sunday is peculiar. Within this century it happens only three times that leap year causes the twenty-fifth of December to pass from Saturday in one year till Monday in the next, the dates being 1820, 1848, and 1876. The interval each time is twenty-eight years-the product of seven multiplied by four, the number of days in a week by the number of years between one leap year and another. Whenever this jump of Christmas Day from Saturday to Monday occurs, it indicates the long period of eleven years between one Sunday Christmas and another. The intervals throughout the century, beginning at 1803, when the twenty-fifth of December was Sunday, present this form :-five years, six years, eleven years; six, five, six, eleven; six, five, six, eleven; six, five, six-and then comes the notable interruption of the year 1900, which spoils the order. These figures and this subject may attract the notice of juvenile readers, home for the holidays, who have not yet made themselves acquainted with the fact that the centenary year, which should be leap year, is not so, and that after 1896 February will not again rise to the dignity of twenty-nine days until the year 1904-because the earth is rather less than 365 days in moving round the sun. This interferes with that curiously regular run of the intervals between one Sunday Christmas and another which we have noted. From 1876 till 1910, the twenty-fifth of December will not venture upon one of those desiderated jumps from Saturday to Monday; so, when we have run out the space of eleven years, commencing with last Christmastide, it will be twenty-nine years before we shall be introduced to another of these long lapses. After 1881, there will be a Christmas Sunday in six years, five years, six, six, and six again before the next eleven. May they spend 'merry Christmas: Days who live to mark the recurrence of the time! Who can tell the manner in which my countrymen, and countrywomen and children of a generation dating forward from 1910 will think proper to commemorate the Festival of the Nativity?

I READ in the American papers that the trees which adorn the public squares of the city of New York are threatened with destruction under peculiar circumstances. The local authorities have been forming new grass plots in the squares, and these, being mound-shaped, have covered up the base of the trees, in some instances to the depth of two feet. It is averred, on the authority of the knowledge of "every good landscape gardener," that the effect of this will be the death of the trees in less than three years; and the condition of the trees in Washington Square, which, a few years ago, were subjected to a similar treatment, and are now withered, is cited to give weight to the warning. I confess that, as an inhabitant of London, I enjoy a feeling of profound, though possibly selfish, satisfaction in contemplating the difficulty in which the inhabitants of New York here find themselves involved. We have not, in the brick-and-mortar desert of our great city, any of those oases of green turf

and leafy trees which break out in smiles over Paris and New York. Consequently, we are not troubled with the wayward fancies of trees which require constant coddling, and threaten to die if any one casts an additional two feet of earth over their roots. The only ornamentation we Londoners indulge in in the public square line consists of rampant lions. and ducal columns; and I have met with persons who are so confident of the impossibility of deteriorating from the appearance of those objects of art, that they could, without a shudder, see them covered with grass mounds even to the crest.

SIR JOSEPH PAXTON drew the original sketch of his Palace of Glass for the first of our International Exhibitions on a sheet of blotting paper which happened to lie upon his desk when the idea struck him; and this sheet of blotting paper has just passed into the hands of his eldest daughter, Mrs. G. H. Stokes. It is a curious and interesting heirloom for the Paxtons to pass on from generation to generation, and of course, personally, far more interesting to them than it can be to any of us. But a memento of this sort is and must always be interesting to every one of us, as well as to most of our visitors; and I hope Mrs. Stokes will not think it very impertinent in Sylvanus Urban to suggest that the proper place for her relic is the MSS. room of the British Museum. It may not be generally known that when Sir Joseph Paxton was turning over this idea of a Palace of Glass in his mind he accidentally met Mr. Robert Stephenson in a railway carriage, and to this most thoughtful and accomplished of engineers the Chatsworth genius propounded his idea over a cigar, explained all its difficulties, and asked how they were to be dealt with. Mr. Stephenson listened in silence to the explanation, puffing away at his cigar, with his eyes closed, and picturing the Paxton Palace in his mind's eye, till at last he burst out in raptures over the beauty and originality of the conception, and offered to do anything that lay in his power to work out the plan. Perhaps with a man of less imagination and less generosity, Paxton's brilliant thought might have been quashed in ten words, as so many brilliant thoughts have been quashed before now and will be again; but Mr. Stephenson strengthened and developed the idea; and in this pen and ink sketch of Paxton's we have the first rude attempt of the architect to work out one of the most original and beautiful conceptions of our time.

APROPOS, may I ask where Lord John Russell's original draft of the Reform Bill of '32 is? That, too, like this sketch of Sir Joseph Paxton's, ought to be under a glass case in the British Museum. The draft of this famous Bill for the reconstruction of our Parliamentary system was, as I suppose every one knows, sketched out by Lord John Russell upon a sheet of note-paper, and in this form submitted to Lord Durham and his companion for their observation. All its points were considered and discussed by the author and his friends, the Ballot clause struck out, with two or three other points in the Liberal programme which it was thought

the country was not then quite ripe for; and in the end this plain sheet of note-paper, with its erasures and interlineations, was handed over to the Government draughtsman to put into the form of a Parliamentary Bill. The fate of this Bill, with all its ups and downs in the House of Commons and in the Lords, is matter of history; but through all the hubbub of that stormy period the imagination fixes itself in the end upon that plain sheet of note-paper, written in Lord John Russell's finical hand, lying upon the table in the Paymaster's Office, with its author and Lord Durham chatting over it as quietly as Sir Joseph Paxton and Stephenson talked over their Glass Palace. That sheet of note-paper represents one of the greatest as well as one of the stormiest of English revolutions. Where is it? In the pigeon-holes of Whitehall, in the library at Chesham Place, or in the archives of Woburn? It is too interesting to be lost.

WILL any one with a turn for statistics take the trouble to reckon up the amount raised by Englishmen yearly in the form of subscriptions to this, that, and the other association, religious or charitable, or for the relief of sufferers from an explosion in a coal pit, from fires in Illinois, from famines in Persia, from earthquakes in Peru, from wars like that which have laid waste the fairest parts of Europe during the past few years? Mr. Alderman Dakin took the trouble, during his year of office as Lord Mayor, to go through the books of the Mansion House, and to find out how much had passed through the hands of the Lord Mayor in the form of relief funds in the course of the past twenty years. The total is upwards of two millions sterling, or, say, £100,000 a year. Of course, this is but a tithe of the total sum raised in the form of driblets in every town and village within the four seas; for-to take only a single illustration-every town of the slightest note raised its own fund, ranging from £50 to £5,000, for the relief of the people of Chicago; and George Müller, keeping up his orphanages at Bristol, as he does, with the waifs and crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, with the residuum of the public purse, has in less than fifteen years netted half a million sterling. These subscriptions form part of the taxation of the country-it is a supplementary taxation, imposed at our own wills, and the question of its amount is quite as interesting as that of our imperial and local taxes.

LONDON: GRANT AND CO., PRINTERS, TURNMILL STREET, E.C.

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