done can be roughly measured by the quantity of phosphates excreted. “Ohne phospher kein gedunke”—“Without phosphorus no thought”—was the saying of a German philosopher. If therefore the soil be deficient in phosphates, or it be in difficultly disintegratable forms, it must be deficient in the cereals and animal food, and the English immigrant eating such cereals and such meat will lack phosphorus—be wanting in brain power. A nation's greatness depends chiefly on its brain power, and in the fierce struggle for existence it is certain that if the soil of a nation were markedly deficient in phosphorus it would succumb to that nation whose soil contained it largely. The great geologist Lyell tells us that at the mouth of a land-locked sea a bar was raised, that the water became brackish, and that the oysters and fish grew scarce. As oysters and fish contain large quantities of phosphorus, this elevation of a single strip of land actually affected the thought power of the coastal people. The quantity of lime in the soil will affect the colonial born, for the bones owe their rigidity to the amount of lime they contain. If this lime be not supplied in proper quantity in the food, the cartilagenous rods bend under the weight of the body, and then are seen the crooked rickety limbs so common among the London poor. On the other hand goitre and cretinism are by learned pathologists attributed to a superabundance of lime in the water, and thus explain it:—At birth the bones of the base of the skull are soft and expand with the growth of the brain, and not till after some years do they become completely ossified, i. e., rendered hard and unyielding. In cretins the temporal sphenoid and occipital bones ossify early, and the brain shut in a rigid case cannot develop, hence cretinism and goitre result. Last year, at the British Association, a Mr. Cooper showed that the mental condition of nations varied with amount and varieties of inorganic impurities in their drinking water, and that all their social, political, and religious qualities might be changed by these impurities. He goes still further and says that by analyzing fossil bones it would be possible to tell the amount of salts contained in the water they drank. Thus for example, by analyzing and comparing both ancient Maori and English skeletons, we could tell approximately the difference in the chemical impurities of the water of the Waikato or of the Severn. And though Mr. Cooper's theory of impurities in water affect a nation's political, social, and religious life, yet really there is nothing physiologically objectionable in the theory, for we know that certain things, as opium, alcohol, tea, indian hemp, &c., do powerfully stimulate or depress men's brains. Indeed, Sir J. Mackintosh