Voltaire.—It is asserted that on every an

Evening Post, Issue 124, 3 July 1865, Page 2

Voltaire. — It is asserted that on every an-

niversary of the massacre of St. Bar tholemew, Voltaire was seized with an involuntary shudder, which always brought on aperodical fever of. four-and-twenty hours' duration '; so great was the impression the idea of that horrible butchery made on his mind. " This," wrote the Marquis de Vilette to Madame de Villevreille, in 1777, " is a fact which hitherto I hud obstinately disbelieved, but which I now attest, and which Volatire's establishment lias witnessed for the last five-and twenty years." Physiological Facts. — A man is taller in the morning than at night to the extent of half-an-iuch, owing to the relaxation of the curtilages. The human brain is the twentyeighth of the body, but that of the horse the four-hundredth. Ten days per annum is the average amount of sickness during human life. About the age of thirty-six the lean man. generally becomes fatter, and the fat man leuner. Ki tcher has enumerated 600 distinct species of disease in the eye. The pulse of children is about 180 in a minute ; ac puberty it is bO ; and at 60 it is only 66. One pair of pigs will increase in six years to 119,160, taking the increase at fourteen pigs each per annum. A pair of sheep in the same time would increase to about 65. A single female house-fly produces in one season 20, OSO, 320 eggs. The flea, the grasshopper and locust jump 200 times their owu length, equal to a quarter of a mile for a man. Petrifaction in the Gkave. — An American paper, the Monongahela Republican, states that, in recently removing the remains of the Mercer family from an old graveyard to Monongahela city cemetery, the body of one, drowned twenty-one years ago which remained in the river eighteen days before burial, was found in a state of petrifaction in a grave filled with water. The feet had fallen off, but the body had turned to a stone ; the head, which had also fallen off, was petrified and the hair well preserved. The body was solid, and upon being struck, gave out a dead, heavy, sound. The petrifaction was so perfect that the pores of the skin were distinct, and the proportions of the form well preserved. The adjoining graves were dry, and the bodies in them had returned to dust. Intelligible at Last. — At a trial recently before the City Court of Brooklyn, New York, in which the plaintiff claimed a verdict and damages against her brother and nephew for taking her to Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, though she, was (she alleged) really of sound mind, Dr. Brown, the principal physician of the asylum, was asked whether it was not possible that a person of insane mind could write such poems aB this lady had written, one of which had become very popular. The doctor's answer was — " Cei&inly

I suppose'the best reply I can give to that question is W state that Adler's German and English Dictionary, which is used as a standard text- book, was written in that institution ; and I will state, as a conclusive fact, that one of the loading newspapers in New York is principally edited in Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum, and the leading editorial is written three or four times a week by a person of unsound mind confined in that institution." At Aleala, Spain, a man condemned to death for murder, starved himself to death after twelve days abstinence from food.