which sustains the oratorical efforts of modern statesmen.  The merits of eggs do not even end here.  In France alone the wine clarifiers use more than 80,000,000 a year, and the Alsatians consume fully 38,000,000 in calico printing and for dressing the leather used in making the finest of French kid gloves.  Finally, not to mention various other employments for eggs in the arts, they may, of course, almost without trouble on the farmer’s part, be converted in fowls, which, in any shape, are profitable to the seller and welcome to the buyer.  Even egg shells are valuable, for aliopath and homeopath alike agree in regarding them as the purest of carbonate of lime.

History of Big Ships.—­In the history of mankind several vessels of extraordinary magnitude have been constructed, all distinctively styled great, and all unfortunately disastrous, with the honorable exception of Noah’s Ark.  Setting aside this antediluvian craft, concerning the authenticity of whose dimensions authorities differ, and which, if Biblical measures are correct, was inferior in size to the vessel of most importance to modern shipowners, the great galley, constructed by the great engineer Archimedes for the great King Hiero II., of Syracuse, is the first illustration.  This ship without a name (for history does not record one) transcended all wonders of ancient maritime construction.  It abounded statues and painting, marble and mosaic work.  It contained a gymnasium, baths, a garden, and arbored walks.  Its artillery discharged stones of 3 cwt., and arrows 18 ft. in length.  An Athenian advertising poet, who wrote a six-line puff of its glories, received the royal reward of six thousand bushels of corn.  Literary merit was at a higher premium in the year 240 B.C., than it is to-day.  The great ship of antiquity was found to be too large for the accommodation of the Syracusan port, and famine reigning in Egypt, Hiero, the charitably disposed, embarked a cargo of ten thousand huge jars of salted fish, two million pounds of salted meat, twenty thousand bundles of different clothes, filled the hold with corn, and consigned her to the seven mouths of the Nile, and since she weighed anchor nothing more has been heard of her fate.  The next great ship worthy of mention is the mythical Saracen encountered in the Mediterranean Sea by the crusading fleet of Richard CIur de Lion, Duke of Guienne and King of England, which, after much slaughter and damage incident to its infidel habit of vomiting Greek fire upon its adversaries, was captured and sunk.  Next in rotation appears the Great Harry, built by Henry VIII., of England, and which careened in harbor during the reign of his successor, under similar circumstances to those attending the Royal George in 1782—­a dispensation that mysteriously appears to overhang a majority of the ocean-braving constructions which, in defiance of every religious sailor’s superstition that the lumber he treads is naturally female, are christened