Our Turn Now.—An excited paragraph in the morning papers announces that "two Doctors of Vienna have succeeded in discovering the Influenza bacillus after a series of experiments in the Chemical and Physiological Laboratory of the University." This is capital. Hitherto the Influenza bacillus has discovered us. Now the tables are turned, and the question is, What shall we do with our prize? A little transaction in boiling lead might not be bad to begin with.
AN OLD FABLE.
Frog. "I mean to be as Big as you, one Day, and Swallow you up. Bust if I don't!"
A "FISH OUT OF WATER" AT GREENWICH.
In a not very wise speech delivered while presiding at the opening of a new series of lectures in connection with the Greenwich Branch of the Society for the Extension of University Teaching, Lord Wolseley modestly admitted "that whatever information he had acquired in life had been acquired from the ordinary penny newspaper which he had read day by day." No doubt this rather humiliating fact accounts for the florid style of the proclamations "Our Only General" used to publish in Egypt and elsewhere—proclamations at the time recognised as having the tone of Astley's in the good old days of the Battle of Waterloo and other military melodramas. However, if it pleases Lord Wolseley to give materials for a future biography, that is no one's concern but his own. Unfortunately he touched upon another matter, about which he knows evidently very little, if anything at all. His Lordship spoke in very disrespectful terms of what he called the "Shilling Dreadful," which, he declared (in this instance accurately enough), was "prized by many people." Certainly the novelette is more popular than The Soldier's Pocket-book, although both brochures are equally works of imagination. So it should be, considering that amongst the authors who have produced it have been Wilkie Collins, Hugh Conway, F. Anstey, Robert Buchanan, Grant Allen, Walter Besant, Rhoda Broughton, and others equally well known to fame. He concluded by remarking, "that if men of all politics were to be shaken up in a bag, he believed there would be very little difference between them." Quite true, if the bag were shaken sufficiently long to complete the transformation—but it would be rather a brutal experiment!