two or three families on each floor, each with their private ash barrel or box kept handy in their rooms, all striving to keep warm during the severe winters of North America.  We also find narrow streets and high buildings, with nothing to arrest the extension of a fire except a few small parks, not even projecting or effectual fire-walls between the several buildings.  And to all this must be added the perfect freedom with which the city authorities of New York allow in its most populous portions large stables, timber yards, carpenters’ shops, and the manufacture and storage of inflammable materials.  Personal liberty could not be carried to a more dangerous extent.  We ought to be thankful that in such matters individual freedom is somewhat hampered in our old-fashioned and quieter-going country.—­London Morning Post.

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THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE ABOUT GAPES.

The gape worm may be termed the bete noir of the poultry-keeper—­his greatest enemy—­whether he be farmer or fancier.  It is true there are some who declare that it is unknown in their poultry-yards—­that they have never been troubled with it at all.  These are apt to lay it down, as I saw a correspondent did in a recent number of the Country Gentleman, that the cause is want of cleanliness or neglect in some way.  But I can vouch that that is not so.  I have been in yards where everything was first-rate, where the cleanliness was almost painfully complete, where no fault in the way of neglect could be found, and yet the gapes were there; and on the other hand, I have known places where every condition seemed favorable to the development of such a disease, and there it was absent—­this not in isolated cases, but in many.  No, we must look elsewhere for the cause.

Observations lead me to the belief that gapes are more than usually troublesome during a wet spring or summer following a mild winter.  This would tend to show that the egg from which the worm (that is in itself the disease) emerges is communicated from the ground, from the food eaten, or the water drunk, in the first instance, but it is more than possible that the insects themselves may pass from one fowl to another.  All this we can accept as a settled fact, and also any description of the way in which the parasitic worms attach themselves to the throats of the birds, and cause the peculiar gaping of the mouth which gives the name to the disease.

Many remedies have been suggested, and my object now is to communicate some of the later ones—­thus to give a variety of methods, so that in case of the failure of one, another will be at hand ready to be tried.  It is a mistake always to pin the faith to one remedy, for the varying conditions found in fowls compel a different treatment.  The old plan of dislodging the worms with a feather is well known, and need not be described again.  But I may mention