of a nature poisonous or explosive.  You have only to visit our hospitals to see the little creatures with hand or fingers mutilated, from being employed at too early an age in the operation of machinery.  Our negligence makes manifest the wisdom of the French law, whose lesson is so necessary with us.”  This needed progress will without doubt be made, and the society will continue with increased zeal its charitable work.  It gives to the legislator the benefit of a practical experience in the work, to the child its powerful advocacy in the courts, to justice the impartiality of prudent investigations, to public opinion the assurance of the proper conduct of charitable institutions and an impulse in the direction of improvement.  It is thus that in this land of enterprise, whose customs are adverse to permitting affairs even of the gravest importance, like the prosecution of crimes or the direction of works of benevolence, to be concentrated in the hands of public officials, the consequences of self-government have been happily corrected in points where they would otherwise become extreme, in regard to children.  The New York society is therefore well described by its worthy president, Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, as “the Hand of Protection.”  And this hand is too charitable for us to forbear to give it a cordial pressure across the vast expanse of the Atlantic.

* * * * *

THE MIDDLESEX CANAL.

BY LORIN L. DAME, A.M.

The curious traveller may still trace with little difficulty the line of the old Middlesex canal, with here and there a break, from the basin at Charlestown to its junction with the Merrimac at Middlesex village.  Like an accusing ghost, it never strays far from the Boston & Lowell Railroad, to which it owes its untimely end.

At Medford, the Woburn sewer runs along one portion of its bed, the Spot pond water-pipes another.  The tow-path, at one point, marks the course of the defunct Mystic Valley Railroad; at others, it has been metamorphosed into sections of the highway; at others, it survives as a cow-path or woodland lane; at Wilmington, the stone sides of a lock have become the lateral walls of a dwelling-house cellar.

Judging the canal by the pecuniary recompense it brought its projectors, it must be admitted a dismal failure; yet its inception was none the less a comprehensive, far-reaching scheme, which seemed to assure a future of ample profits and great public usefulness.  Inconsiderable as this work may appear compared with the modern achievements of engineering, it was, for the times, a gigantic undertaking, beset with difficulties scarcely conceivable to-day.  Boston was a small town of about twenty thousand inhabitants; Medford, Woburn, and Chelmsford were insignificant villages; and Lowell was as yet unborn, while the valley of the Merrimac, northward into New Hampshire, supported a sparse agricultural population.  But the outlook