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DUCK HUNTING IN SCOTLAND.

The wild duck is a shy bird, apt to spread his wings and change his quarters when a noble sportsman is seen approaching his habitation with a fowling piece.  You have heard of the ass who put on a lion’s skin, and wandered out into the wilderness and brayed.  I have elaborated a device of equal ingenuity and more convincing realism.  It is my habit during the duck-shooting season to put on the skin of a Blondin donkey and so roam among the sedges bordering on the lakes where wild ducks most do congregate.  I have cut a hole in the face to see through, and other holes in the legs to put my hands through.—­London Graphic

[Illustration:  WILDFOWL SHOOTING IN SCOTLAND.]

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A PLEA FOR THE COMMON TELESCOPE.[1]

By G.E.  LUMSDEN.

  [Footnote 1:  Paper read before the Astronomical and Physical
  Society of Toronto, Canada, April 18, 1891.]

These are the palmiest days in the eventful history of physical and observational astronomy.  Along the whole line of professional and amateur observation substantial progress is being made, but in certain new directions, and in some old ones, too, the advance is very rapid.  As never before, public interest is alive to the attractions and value of the work of astronomers.  The science itself now appeals to a constituency of students and readers daily increasing in numbers and importance.  Evidence of this gratifying fact is easily obtained.  There is at the libraries an ever-growing demand for standard astronomical works, some of them by no means intended to be of a purely popular character.  Some of the most influential and conservative magazines on both sides of the Atlantic now find it to be in their interest to devote pages of space to the careful discussion of new theories, or to the results of the latest work of professional observers.  Even the daily press in some cities has caught the infection, if infection it may be called.  There are in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and other centers of population on this continent leading newspapers which, every week or so, publish columns of original matter contributed by writers evidently able to place before their readers in an attractive form articles dealing accurately, and yet in a popular vein, with the many-sided subject of astronomy.  In scientific matters generally, there is abroad in this and other countries a spirit of inquiry, never more apparent than at the present time.