in mounting him for a brief excursion.  This is a story we have told so often that we should begin to doubt it but for the fact that we have before us the written statement of the person who was its subject.  His professor, who did not know his name or anything about him, stopped him one day after lecture and asked him if he was not a relation of Mr. ——­, a person of some note in Essex County.—­Not that he had ever heard of.—­The professor thought he must be,—­would he inquire?—­Two or three days afterwards, having made inquiries at his home in Middlesex County, he reported that an elder member of the family informed him that Mr. ——­’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side and his own great-grandfather on his father’s side were own cousins.  The whole class of facts, of which this seems to us too singular an instance to be lost, is forcing itself into notice, with new strength of evidence, through the galleries of photographic family-portraits which are making everywhere.

In the course of a certain number of years there will have been developed some new physiognomical results, which will prove of extreme interest to the physiologist and the moralist.  They will take time; for, to bring some of them out fully, a generation must be followed from its cradle to its grave.

The first is a precise study of the effects of age upon the features.  Many series of portraits taken at short intervals through life, studied carefully side by side, will probably show to some acute observer that Nature is very exact in the tallies that mark the years of human life.

The second is to result from a course of investigations which we would rather indicate than follow out; for, if the student of it did not fear the fate of Phalaris,—­that he should find himself condemned as unlifeworthy upon the basis of his own observations,—­he would very certainly become the object of eternal hatred to the proprietors of all the semi-organizations which he felt obliged to condemn.  It consists in the study of the laws of physical degeneration,—­the stages and manifestations of the process by which Nature dismantles the complete and typical human organism, until it becomes too bad for her own sufferance, and she kills it off before the advent of the reproductive period, that it may not permanently depress her average of vital force by taking part in the life of the race.  There are many signs that fall far short of the marks of cretinism,—­yet just as plain as that is to the visus eruditus,—­which one meets every hour of the day in every circle of society.  Many of these are partial arrests of development.  We do not care to mention all which we think may be recognized, but there is one which we need not hesitate to speak of from the fact that it is so exceedingly common.