SCIENTIFIC AID TO SPIRITUALISM. A VERY good idea was carried out at the lectures recently given by Mr. J. Jones, of Enmore Park, to the two Spiritual Associations in London. Dissolving view apparatus was called into play, and no more effi cient instrument can possibly be found, to make lectures attractive and interesting. The apparatus used at the two lectures just mentioned, perhaps does well enough for small rooms, but in a hall of moderately large size it would be a failure, because the light is too feeble to bear dilution over the area which it would be necessary to make the picture cover, when the building is a large one. In such cases the oil lamps must be abolished, and the oxhydrogen light substituted. Doubtless it would be good policy to have one good set of dissolving-view apparatus made for common use at spiritual lectures in London. In such apparatus, much depends upon the condensers—the large lenses between the slide and the light. In some lanterns there is only one lens instead of two, at this place, and with such instruments there is such a great loss of light that it is falsc economy to buy them. Another very important part of a lantern, is the combination of lenses known as the “ object-glass.” Bad object  glasses will often give bad definition, and will not give a “flat field." When the latter fault is present, the centre and the circumference of the picture cannot possibly both be brought into sharp focus upon the Very much good taste screen at the same time. was displayed in the lantern slides painted by Mr. Bielfeld, and shown at the two lectures recently delivered, one of them representing a butterfly and caterpillar upon the branch of a tree, being specially well done. There was also much ideality in the design of most of them. In one picture, however spirits were painted with wings, and these wings had better be left out, otherwise they may give good hold for adverse criticism, when many stiffnecked unbelievers chance to be present during their exhibition. PERIODICAL LITERATURE.—Last month the first num ber of a very valuable weekly publication, called Nature was published by Macmillan. It is a journal receiving the countenance and literary support of Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin Lockyer, Balfour Stewart, Thomson, and thirty or forty more of the leading philosophers of Europe and America. A high class publication, popularising science, has long been wanted for as yet no weekly publication in England has becn devoted exclusively to natural philosophy. It is well printed and edited, and its motto by Wordsworth - “To the solid ground Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye." we thought of stealing for THE SPIRITUALIST, but space here is too valuable for such poetical repetitions. The first article in Nature is by Goethe, a Spiritualist, who has in this case found a translator in Professor Huxley, of all men in the world. The fault of the new journal is that it does not include the greatest of all the sciences—Spiritualism. When learned bodies who have persistently ignored mes merism for many long years, see it firmly established by the aid of its stronger brother, Spiritualism, in the public mind, they will find themselves in a position from which they must retreat, whether they like to do so or not. So much for the introduction of dogmatism into science. The managers of the Times are again, it is believed, seriously contemplating another reduction in the price of the journal, the competition of other papers more truthfully representing public interests being severe. The Morning Star last month died a very quiet death, after transferring its worldly interests to the Daily News. The Newspaper Press, a monthly organ of newspaper people, published by Mr. E. W. Allen, states that Mr. E. R. Russell, late of the Morning Star, has returned once more to Liverpool, as editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, on a salary of £1,000 a year. Canada is to have a comic paper under the title of Grinchuckle. THe THOUGHTS OF A MOLE.—My hyacinths would blos som if the moles did not cat up the bulbs at such a fearful rate. I consider a mole’s opinion of the structure and use of my hyacinths to be very much like most folk's notions of moral truth. The moles see the bottom, and nothing else. Imagine a mole forming a philosophical theory of my bulbs. In mole’s language, he would say. A hyacinth is a vegetable creation put under ground for the benefit of the moles. It has been held by some moles that a hyacinth has an existence above ground, and speculatists have gone so far as to say that this root is only a kind of starting point, while the best part of the plant is above ground. But there is no evidence of that, and it is doubtless a vagary of the -H. W. Beecher. imagination.