with geodesy and practical astronomy.  The steam engineering laboratory provides practice in testing, adjusting, and managing steam machinery.  The appliances in connection with mining and metallurgy include a five-stamp battery, Blake crusher, automatic machine jigs, an engine pulverizer, a Root and a Sturtevant blower, with blast reverberating, wasting, cupellation, and fusion furnaces, and all other means for reducing ores.  The architectural museum contains many thousand casts, models, photographs, and drawings.  The shops for handwork are large and well arranged, and include a vise-shop, forge shop, machine, tool, and lathe shops, foundry, rooms for pattern making, weaving, and other industrial institutions.  The vise-shop contains four heavy benches, with 32 vises attached, giving a capacity for teaching 128 students the course every ten weeks, or 640 in a year of fifty weeks.  The forge-shop has eight forges.  The foundry has 16 moulding benches, an oven for core baking, and a blast furnace of one-half ton capacity.  The pattern-weaving room is provided with five looms, one of them in 20-harness, and 4-shuttle looms, and another an improved Jacquard pattern loom.  It may safely be said that there is nor an establishment in the world better equipped for industrial and technical education than this Institute of Massachusetts.—­London Building News.

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IVORY GETTING SCARCE.—­The stock of ivory in London is estimated at about forty tons in dealers’ private warehouses, whereas formerly they usually held about one hundred tons.  One fourth of all imported into England goes to the Sheffield cutlers.  No really satisfactory substitute for ivory has been found, and millions await the discoverer of one.  The existing substitutes will not take the needed polish.

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THE ANAESTHETICS OF JUGGLERS.

Fakirs are religious mendicants who, for the purpose of exciting the charity of the public, assume positions in which it would seem impossible that they could remain, submit themselves to fearful tortures, or else, by their mode of living, their abstinence, and their indifference to inclement weather and to external things, try to make believe that, owing to their sanctity, they are of a species superior to that of common mortals.

In the Indies, these fakirs visit all the great markets, all religious fetes, and usually all kinds of assemblages, in order to exhibit, themselves.  If one of them exhibits some new peculiarity, some curious deformity, a strange posture, or, finally, any physiological curiosity whatever that surpasses those of his confreres, he becomes the attraction of the fete, and the crowd surrounds him, and small coin and rupees begin to fall into his bowl.