A French writer some time since informed his countrymen that in America wooden hams were a regular article of manufacture.  This is a fact not generally known; but at any rate, according to Pierre Veron, we have not yet quite outdone the Old World in the arts of commercial fraud.  Worthy Johnny Crapaud used to flatter himself that he outwitted the grocers in buying his coffee unground, but now rogues make artificial coffee-kernels in a mould, and the Paris police court (which does not appreciate ingenuity of that sort) lately gave six months in prison to some makers of sham coffee-grains, thus interfering with a business which was earning twenty thousand dollars a year.  Some of the Paris pastry-cooks make balls for vol-au-vent with a hash of rags allowed to soak in gravy; sham larks and partridges for pates are constructed out of chopped-up meat, neatly shaped to represent those birds; peddlers of sweet-meats sell marshmallow paste made out of Spanish white; the fish-merchant inserts the eyes of a fresh mackerel in a stale turbot, to trick his sharp customers; and as to drinks, one dyer boldly puts over his door “Burgundy Vintages!” They make marble of pasteboard and diamonds of glass.  Adulteration on adulteration, moans M. Veron, all is adulteration!

* * * * *

The problem of aerial navigation seems at present to be agitating as many pseudo-scientific minds as did that of perpetual motion not many years ago, or the philosopher’s stone at a more remote period.  It possesses perhaps a still stronger attraction in the danger connected with the experiments—­the source, we suppose, of the eagerness shown by Professor Wise and his associates to fly to evils that they know not of.  Perpetual motion received its quietus from the blasts of ridicule.  Air-voyaging has a worse foe to encounter.  It may survive the attacks of gayety, but it will succumb, we fancy, to the resistless force of gravity.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine.  New York:  Holt & Williams.

The task formerly undertaken by Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland, in adapting to our language the songs of Heine, is now well supplemented with some versions from among his prose works by another Philadelphian translator, Mr. Simon Adler Stern.  Heine’s prose, delicate in its pellucid brightness as any of his poetry, cannot be held too precious by the interpreter.  The latter must have all his wits about him, or he will not find English at once simple enough and distinguished enough to stand for the original.  To get at Heine’s prose exactly in another language must be almost as hard as to get at his poetry.  The principal selection made by Mr. Stern is a long rambling rhapsody called “Florentine Nights,” in which the author professes to pour into the ears of a dying mistress the history of some of his former amours and exaltations, the natural jealousy of the listener going for a stimulus in the recital.  His first love, however, is an idealization—­a Greek statue which he visits by moonlight, as Sordello in Browning’s poem does the