deliberations of the Select Committee. They would willingly admit that one swallow does not make a summer, while they too readily adopted the conclusion that one Scotch newspaper represents the seeling of the provincial press. It may be well worth the while of those interested in the conduct of daily newspapers throughout the provinces to take the matter into their serious and immediate consideration, and take steps towards having their deliberate opinion placed in authoritative form before the House. To do this would be wise, but it will also be necessary to be wise in time, for the House of Commons is at present entirely under misapprehension of the true state of Creamstances, and may at some unexpected moment take irrevocable action.

This error is a natural result of action taken upon principles long since scouted by the House of Commons. The profession of Parliamentary reporting is now about the only business with the regulations of which the House arbitrarily interferes. There is a curious and indefensible belief, imbibed with the atmosphere of the House, that it is the duty of the London newspapers fully to report the debates in the House of Commons. It finds expression in the already-quoted odd injunction to the Speaker, which would entail upon the right hon. gentleman, after having heard Mr. Biggar or Mr. O'Donnell through an hour's speech, the duty of spending his Saturday afternoons in seeing that the newspapers having representatives in the gallery gave "in good faith a full report" of it. Mr. Rylands, Mr. Barclay, Sir Alexander Gordon, and other advocates of the purity of Parliamentary reporting, have in view the pleasing spectacle of their own speeches reported at full length in the newspapers. If that were all, it might be, more or less, well. But that would not be carrying out the terms of the tenure upon which seats are to be held in the gallery. A full report does not mean that a reporter is to be at liberty to exercise his intelligence, judgment, and skill in sparing the public the talk of foolish persons. That is what is done now, and it is against such practice that Mr. Rylands raised his voice in Committee of Supply the other night. The only fair and reasonable construction both of the letter and of the sense of the report of the Committee of last Session is that a full report of every speech made in the House of Commons must be given in the newspapers.

The experience of managers of newspapers, who may be supposed to know something of their own business, is that the public get precisely as much Parliamentary report as they will read. Evidence on this subject is within reach of every man anxious for information. Let him devote a day to making inquiry among his acquaintances as to

their measure of reading the Parliamentary reports. Of a hundred men, he will probably find that sixty have read the summary of the debate; ten have glanced down the columns of report and picked out passages in the more important speeches; two, being members of the House who have spoken in the debate reported, have fondly read a single speech through (not the same speech); and the remaining twenty-eight did not know, till mention was made of the circumstance, that the House of Commons had been sitting on the previous day.

It will be seen that, if this statement is true (and it can be tested in greater or less measure by any one interested), the most widelyread report of Parliamentary proceeding is that supplied by the Summary-writers of the several newspapers. By an odd coincidence, which is at the same time perfectly logical, it is against the Summarywriters that the ire of the Committee is chiefly roused, and the proposal is made that they should be relegated to positions in the gallery where it is admitted it would be impossible for them properly to perform their work. The Summary is the most severely condensed report of the Parliamentary proceedings, and therefore Summarywriters merit the deeper condemnation. Yet, if Summaries were abolished, Parliamentary debates would become a closed book to at least one-half of the public, who, in spite of its latent attractiveness, positively decline to wade through the extended report. If it might be obtained, it would be interesting to have a return of the number of hon. members who, chancing to be absent from the House on a given night, confine their reading of the debates to the Parliamentary Summary of the Times-one of the most able and skilful feats of journalism which the English press supplies.

As for the general public, I may mention a fact that came under my knowledge at the time the Committee was sitting in 1878. An examination of the weekly papers published in Great Britain showed that, not having occasion in the circumstances of their publication to supply themselves at first hand with Parliamentary reports, six out of ,ten were in the habit of availing themselves of the Parliamentary Summary of the Daily News. The great majority of the readers of these papers doubtless find their sole pabulum of Parliamentary reports in their weekly paper, and consequently obtain their only information on what takes place in Parliament through the medium of the very agency which the Committee in their wisdom hold in such light esteem.

The matter is one of common sense, and it must be added that it is one in which members of Parliament accustomed to take part in recurring debate upon it show conspicuously little. You may take

a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink; and on the same principle, you may present the purchaser of a newspaper with twelve columns of Parliamentary report: but you will not only not make him read them, but will by perseverance succeed in losing a subscriber to the paper. An interesting attempt was made very recently in Burnley, In the enthusiasm of the moment which saw the return of Mr. Peter Rylands as member for the borough, the local newspaper despatched to one of the news agencies instructions to report the hon. member's speeches in full. The order was obeyed, with most disastrous consequences upon the circulation of the paper, and after a very brief trial it was countermanded. This, I may add, is not a joke, but a plain matter-of-fact statement, the truth of which can be substantiated.

As far as the London papers are concerned, the simple truth is, they give in varying measure precisely as much Parliamentary report as the public will read. To endeavour to compel them to give more by any threat of withdrawing conveniences for carrying on their work is a piece of petty tyranny unworthy the House of Commons, and will prove as idle as the Sumptuary Laws which in darker ages sought to regulate the length of men's cloaks or the cut of their beards.

THE MEMBER FOR THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS

251

TABLE TALK.

UITE a flutter of excitement has throbbed through the scientific world in consequence of the sensational arrival of a new and unexpected visitor. Not a new comet, nor a big aerolite, nor .the satellite that Venus is fairly entitled to, nor any more asteroids, but a small thing one-third of an inch in diameter; a new inhabitant of the waters, not brought from the tropics nor the antipodes, nor dredged from the dark profundities of the Atlantic by the heroes of a costly expedition, but vulgarly fished by tablespoon and tumbler from a commonplace artificial tank in the lily-house of the Botanical Society. Not a solitary individual merely, but a swarming colony has arrived all at once. The largest measured nearly half-an-inch across its body, but its name, Limnocodium Victoria, is much longer.

It is a fresh-water jelly-fish, or hydroid medusa. Jelly-fishes are common enough; multitudes of species and varieties swarm through the ocean in countless millions, of all sizes, from that of a pin's-head to the dimensions of a chaise umbrella. I have seen juvenile jellyfishes so numerous near the surface that a bucketful of sea-water hauled on deck appeared like thin water-gruel, though each pulsating parachute was only about of an inch in diameter. At certain times and places full-grown specimens are thrown so abundantly on our own shores that the sands left by the receding tide are nearly covered with them.

On one of these occasions a farmer accustomed to use sprats and sea-weed as manure, collected a cart-load of stranded medusæ, and carried them on a hot sunny day to his fields. On preparing to unload he found nothing but a thin film of matted membrane on the bottom of his cart. This film was the total of the solid portion of the whole cart-load of jelly-fishes, the rest being water, which had escaped on the road: justifying the naturalist who described these creatures as "organised water," i.e. organised sea-water. Nobody supposed that fresh water could thus be organised until the arrival of this swarm in the Botanical Gardens.

Professors Allman and Ray Lankester have carefully examined this novelty, and pronounce it to be unquestionably a true medusa,

though it constitutes a new genus. It swims, like its marine cousins, by opening and closing its umbrella-shaped body or velum with a movement very similar to the partial closing and re-opening of an umbrella.

The old-fashioned medusæ of the sea are killed by a temperature of 70° Fahr.; the new-comer seems quite happy at 80°, and is not killed until the water reaches 100°. On the other hand, the marine species survive freezing, which is fatal to the fresh-water jelly-fishes. They resemble the marine animal in swarming towards the sunlight and subsiding after sunset, but differ in being non-phosphorescent.

Marine medusæ collapse, become motionless, and sink if placed in fresh water, but recover if speedily restored to their proper element. They may survive ten minutes' immersion in fresh water, but fifteen minutes kills them.

The fresh-water medusa dies gradually after only one minute's immersion in sea-water, and is more slowly killed even by sea-water diluted with five times its bulk of fresh water, and it barely survives in a dilution of 1 to 12.

These facts suggest curious speculations. At first it was supposed that the rare fresh-water genus was evolved from one of the many sea-water species by migration up a gradually sweetening estuary till it reached the fresh water of the river. But this is contradicted by the intolerance of sea-water by the fresh-water specimens. Animals that have been forced into a new habitat or climate, or otherwise constrained to new conditions, betray a special facility of reversion to their original conditions of life. Applying this principle to the medusæ, it seems as though their primitive element was fresh rather than salt water, and that our new arrival is an aristocrat, a direct descendant of the original uncorrupted patriarchal medusa.

This again opens another question. Was the primitive ocean more or less salt than that of to-day? The saltness of the sea is doubtless due to the solution of materials of the land, but has this saltness gone on increasing or diminishing? The existence of beds of rock-salt, evidently deposited by ancient seas that have dried away, indicates the existence of more salt formerly than now in some of the dried-up inland seas; and the theory of a cooling globe, and an ocean that has very slowly cooled from a boiling heat to its present temperature, is suggestive of greater solvent powers in olden times than recently, and consequent greater salinity.

On the other hand, an ocean condensed from a hot vaporous atmosphere must have been at first a body of pure unsaline distilled water, and its first inhabitants all fresh-water creatures, some of