POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



713 



versally accepted, which makes the literary 

 progress of a pupil the principal test of his 

 mental capacity, is altogether false. Liter- 

 ary ability is a special talent, as much as is 

 proficiency in music or in any of the fine 

 arts. And as there are many persons who 

 have not the slightest gift in these direc- 

 tions, so are there many who can not write 

 a pleasing essay or letter, or appreciate the 

 style of a great author ; yet the unmusical 

 man may be a clever and successful business 

 man, and the non-literate man may become 

 a great artist or develop genius in some other 

 direction. In fact, many a man who in his 

 boyhood found it difficult to adapt himself 

 to the literary standard of the school has 

 broken his way to fame and success by 

 means of talents of which his pedantic 

 teachers had not the faintest inkling. . . . 

 In our school we have had and yet have 

 pupils who seem to be still incapable of ac- 

 quiring the art of composition or even the 

 lesser grace of correct orthography. Some 

 of these have been with us only a short time, 

 and we are therefore not responsible for their 

 deficiencies ; but some have been pupils of 

 the school from the Kindergarten up, and 

 have received the same careful training as 

 the others, yet they lag behind in language. 

 Nevertheless, some of these non-literate 

 pupils do admirable work in other branches. 

 It has been noticed that in the case of these 

 children proficiency in manual training and 

 art work, and in natural history, usually go 

 together. They exhibit the liveliest interest 

 in these branches, and their inner life ap- 

 pears to be rich, while their faculty of ex- 

 pression is only a stammering. With such 

 pupils the greatest patience must be exer- 

 cised. After they have developed their 

 peculiar bent, and are encouraged bv their 

 success in the manual branches, they grad- 

 ually gain - better control of tongue and 

 pen." 



Systematic Begging. The business of 

 begging is better organized in Paris than in 

 American cities. A large association exists 

 there,.calling itself the Paris Syndicate of Pro- 

 fessional Mendicants. The managing commit- 

 tee assigns posts to its members, protects 

 them from competition, collects their receipts 

 once or twice a day, and pays each one his 

 proportion of the general profits once a week. 



The proper income of each post is accurately 

 known, and" any " embezzlement " is quickly 

 detected and punished. A certain percent- 

 age of the receipts is retained for the general 

 expenses of the syndicate and for a reserve 

 fund. A lodging-house has been bought 

 with this fund, and the remainder is invested 

 in shares and bonds. There is no sick or 

 burial fund the sick are best able to ex- 

 cite charity, and when they become actually 

 disabled there are the free hospitals ; while 

 the funerals of the poor are paid for by the 

 state. Why should the professional mendi- 

 cants waste their money on these things, 

 when the tax-payers will provide them? 

 The alleys in the Champs-Elysees are good 

 posts for picturesque-looking old men. On 

 a good day such should collect from thirty 

 to forty francs each six to eight dollars. 

 One veteran used to get as his share of the 

 division over seventeen dollars a week. He 

 has now retired. The better class of mendi- 

 cants look forward to saving enough to buy 

 a cottage in the country, and living there- 

 after on an annuity, while the good-for- 

 nothings spend their income in sottish de- 

 bauchery. The Municipal Council, after an 

 investigation, recently decided to tolerate the 

 existence of the syndicate. 



The Soaring Puzzle. Marey, the author 

 of Animal Mechanism, has recently published 

 a book on The Flight of Birds, in which he 

 gives an answer to the much-debated ques- 

 tion as to how birds soar. Many persona 

 have wondered at the power possessed by 

 birds especially the large birds of prey 

 of moving against a breeze without a flap 

 of their wings. This has been regarded as 

 like a log thrown into a river floating against 

 the stream. Birds when soaring fly in cir- 

 cles or ellipses, which appear to observers 

 below to lie in horizontal planes. But 

 Bakounine discovered that these ellipses 

 were inclined the forward end being the 

 lower. Taking this with the fact that a 

 head-wind is a necessary condition, M. Marey 

 concludes that each strong gust of wind, 

 striking the bird's wings at an angle, raises 

 it and wafts it backward, until the wind 

 lessening somewhat permits the bird, by 

 changing the slant of its wings slightly, to 

 glide forward and downward with the force 

 due to its elevated position. One side of an 



