NOTES.

Sir Richard Wallace evidently aims to make himself, in a small way, the Peabody of Paris. A cynic might maintain that his gifts were a trifle sensational, and shaped with a view to procure the greatest amount of notoriety at the price; but that they are frequent, and that they show a hearty love for Paris on the Englishman's part, none can deny. It was Sir Richard who not long ago gave about five thousand dollars to the use of the Paris poor; it was he who, in the late hunting-season, is said to have proposed to supply the city hospitals with fresh game—whether of his own shooting or of that of his compatriots does not appear; it is he, in fine, who has furnished to Paris eighty street-fountains, costing in the factory six hundred and seventy-five francs each, or a total of fifty-four thousand francs (say ten thousand eight hundred dollars), the expense of setting them up being undertaken by the city. These drinking-jets are in the main like those so familiar in American cities, and are provided, of course, with tin cups attached by iron chains—"à la mode Anglaise" add the French papers in an explanatory way. Now, the extraordinary fact concerning these fountains is, that no sooner had the first installment of nine been put up than all the tin cups, or "goblets," as the Parisians call them, were stolen. They were renewed, and again disappeared in a trice. In short, within fifteen days no less than forty-seven of these goblets were made way with, despite their strong fastenings—that is, an average of over five cups to each fountain. What the sum-total of plunder has been since the first fortnight, or whether the fountains are still as useless as spiked cannon or tongueless bells, we have yet to learn.

Now comes a contrast. The countrymen of Sir Richard claim that in London from time immemorial not a single cup was ever stolen from the public fountains. So tempting a theme for generalization could not be resisted by the Paris newspaper philosophers, who have deduced from this theft of the cups a broad distinction between the British loafer and the French loafer, declaring that the former "respects any collective property which he partly shares," while the latter does not even draw this distinction, but grabs whatever he can lay his hands on. "The luck of the Wallace fountains," cries one moralizer, "shows how hard it is to reform the Paris gamin so long as the law contents itself with its present measures. If the state does not speedily educate children found straying in the street, it is all up with the present generation." Thereupon follows a disquisition on the part which Paris children played in the Commune. "Now, the child," adds our newspaper Wordsworth, "is the man viewed through the big end of the opera-glass;" and he points his moral, therefore, with the need of compulsory education. "One of the first duties incumbent on the Chamber at the next session will be the solution of this question. Let it take as a perpetual goad the fate of the Wallace goblets. You begin by stealing a cup of tin—you end by firing the Tuileries or plundering the Hôtel Thiers." There is a droll mingling of Isaac Watts and Victor Hugo in this dénoûment, and despite its practical good sense one is amused at the evolution of a grave discourse from so trivial a text as the Wallace drinking-cups.

To people of a statistical rather than a sentimental turn, the mathematics of marriage in different countries may prove an attractive theme of meditation. It is found that young men from fifteen to twenty years of age marry young women averaging two or three years older than themselves, but if they delay marriage until they are twenty to twenty-five years old, their spouses average a year younger than themselves; and thenceforward this difference steadily increases, till in extreme old age on the bridegroom's part it is apt to be enormous. The inclination of octogenarians to wed misses in their teens is an every-day occurrence, but it is amusing to find in the love-matches of boys that the statistics bear out the satires of Thackeray and Balzac. Again, the husbands of young women aged twenty and under average a little above twenty-five years, and the inequality of age diminishes thenceforward, till for women who have reached thirty the respective ages are equal: after thirty-five years, women, like men, marry those younger than themselves, the disproportion increasing with age, till at fifty-five it averages nine years.

The greatest number of marriages for men take place between the ages of twenty and twenty-five in England, between twenty five and thirty in France, and between twenty-five and thirty-five in Italy and Belgium. Finally, in Hungary the number of individuals who marry is seventy-two in a thousand each year; in England it is 64; in Denmark, 59; in France, 57, the city of Paris showing 53; in the Netherlands, 52; in Belgium, 43; in Norway, 36. Widowers indulge in second marriages three or four times as often as widows. For example, in England (land of Mrs. Bardell) there are 66 marriages of widowers against 21 of widows; in Belgium there are 48 to 16; in France, 40 to 12. Old Mr. Weller's paternal advice, to "beware of the widows," ought surely to be supplemented by a maxim to beware of widowers.

SHAKESPEARE, in one of his most famous madrigals, draws a vivid contrast between youth and age, which, he declares, "cannot live together:"

Science, which ruthlessly destroys so much poetry by its mattock and spade, its scales, foot-rules and gauges, must now, we should judge, take grave exception to the preceding bit of poesy and to the thousand repetitions of its sentiment by the bards of all ages. By means of a thermometer lately constructed to register with exactitude the degree of heat in the human body, it is found, after numerous experiments under varying circumstances, that the instrument marks 37.08° of heat on an average for persons between twenty-one and thirty years of age, while it marks 37.46° for people aged eighty. In face of this fact what becomes of the "fervors of youth" and the "chills of age"? The highest average temperatures in the human body, as indicated by this gauge, are those which exist from birth to puberty—that is to say, 37.55° and 37.63°. From the latter epoch the heat gradually lowers, to rise again with the first approach of old age. Thus childhood shows the highest temperature, old age the next, and middle life the lowest. We may add that the greatest variations in the temperature of the body between health and sickness are only a few tenths of a degree, according to this measurement; for, the normal condition being 37.2° or 37.3°, an increase to 38° would mark a burning fever, and a decrease to 36° would note the icy approach of death. Hereafter, though we may graciously excuse to poetic license the assertion that

we must yet sternly protest that the reason assigned—namely, that "youth is hot and age is cold"—is contradicted by the facts of science.