Dead Languages Vanishing.—In the eighty higher grammar schools in Germany which are entitled to grant certificates of the proficiency requisite in order that military service may be reduced from three years to one, French and English are the only foreign languages taught, Latin being excluded.

Higher Education of Women.—Women in Russia have for the last twenty-three years been permitted to obtain university degrees, and now they are permitted to enter the medical profession. Sweden and Norway have followed the example, so has Italy and even Portugal. De Castro, the Portuguese prime minister, says that the improvement of female education is the most urgent question of the day. In France, Mad. Kergomard has been elected a member of the Superior Council of Public Instruction by a large majority.

In the London University this year, there were 340 successful candidates, sixty-one of whom were ladies. They were rather more successful than the men in gaining honors.

Emily S. Bouton says, “In England a society has been formed of young women, some of them belonging to families of wealth and distinction. Each member binds herself upon entering to learn some one thing, whether art, profession or trade, so thoroughly, that if misfortune comes she will be able to maintain herself by its exercise. It is the beginning of a realization by women themselves, that for any work that demands wages, there must be, not a superficial knowledge which is sure to fail when the test is applied, but a training that will give the mastery of all the faculties, and enable the worker to labor to a definite purpose.”

Bad Sunday-School Books.—An Eastern correspondent of the St. Louis Globe has been talking with a Sunday-school superintendent about the bad books in the Sunday-school library, as follows:

“But that isn’t all or the worst of it,” continued the superintendent. “Not long ago one of the teachers came to me and said her faith in orthodoxy had been very much shaken, and she did not know that she could conscientiously remain longer in the school. Several of her class were also losing their confidence in the old creed. She said this result had been reached by reading one of the books in the Sunday-school library. It was ‘Bluffton,’ and was the account of how a young Presbyterian minister had gradually been converted to rationalism, and had finally taken his congregation with him over to liberalism. I hunted up the work and read it. The author is Rev. Minot J. Savage, the prominent and eloquent Boston Unitarian clergyman. The book is a remarkable one, and even made me feel uncomfortable, as hide-bound in Calvinism as I supposed I was. Investigation showed that a score of our older scholars and several of the teachers had been very much impressed by the story, and had been talking the subject over. The book is all the more effective because it is a faithful portrayal, so I understand, of Mr. Savage’s experience. How the book got into our library I don’t know, but I suppose the selections were made by some clerk in the publishing house of whom we purchased. He saw the book was by a minister, and naturally presumed it was eminently fit. Right in our own city I have learned that ‘Bluffton’ is in half a dozen libraries, and is doing deadly work to orthodoxy. Of course this sort of thing must stop.”

Our Barbarous Orthography.—An attempt was once made to introduce the English language in Japan, but their learned men decided that the irregularities of English spelling and grammar were a fatal objection. The best illustration of its barbarism is to attempt to carry it out uniformly,

The attempt to form the past tense of verbs by analogy produces this amusing result from the pen of H. C. Dodge.