so have all first-rate marriage-breakfast and after-dinner speakers; but only highly-gifted and exceptional people besides. The inquirer who has found out after five or six timid ventures that a lady is not going to somebody's party, and has not been to the Opera, and does not want to see the Paris Exhibition, feels what it is to be deficient in it. The shade that settles, after all these failures, over his countenance is indicative, not so much of constitutional lowness of spirits as of temporary despair. Irrev erent critics are fond of saying that the fault is on the side of the lady. Women ought to be better taught, and to be more amusing to talk to. This line of argument is weak and ungenerous. If young Englishwomen were more highly educated, dancing men would perhaps not be able to cope with them. Without having recourse to such extreme reforms, it might be possible to introduce some system that would tend to general relief. One does not see why much might not be effected by the means of a the moment to invent a sound working plot, which will do, at all events, for the pauses of the dance, as might be supposed. Love, murder, and matrimony, all jumbled up together, will form the nucleus of it, and long before it is necessary to arrive at the catastrophe, another partner will claim her for the next waltz. It is right in candour to add that this method, like the riddle system, has its perils for a beginner. Some ladies will say that they have read anything you name; and the first time that a tyro gravely learns from his fair companion that she has been perusing a three-volume romance which never existed except in his own too vivid imagination, he runs the risk of losing his head and seeming disconcerted. The proper course to adopt under such circumstances is at once to ask her whether she prefers the hero or the heroine; and if she is hypocritical enough, as she will be, to say the heroine, then to ask her why? Before she has met this interroga tion fairly, it is ten chances to one that the time will have come to part. In any case, the ex-powerful Ball-room Executive, and the princicitement of steering through the difficulty, and the interest of watching her steer through hers, will enable one to perform the dance with more than English vivacity and liveliness. The necessity for discovering some theory upon which small talk must be conducted at once appears from the consideration that small talk will always exist as an institution of the country. There must always be a beginning to any intercourse between two people of different sexes who have never spoken to each other before. Men surmount this critical period in an acquaintance amongst themselves easily enough, and so, on the other hand, do women. If an Englishman is hard up for a start, he can always smoke; and more friendships, even in this cynical world, begin in smoke than end in it. Newspapers, wine, race-horses, and the hounds are sufficiently inexhaustible and fertile subjects to proceed with until the ice is definitely broken. And Englishwomen amongst them. selves are well supplied. They have the interminable theme, in the first place, of each other's dresses. Happily for them, every one of them is always dressed differently; and, accordingly, the first half-hour of an acquaintance passes as quickly and pleasantly as could be wished. And after dresses, there is for those at least who are married the endless field opened up by babies; for though, to masculine observers, one baby is very much like another, a woman knows that every baby has its own special points. But the breaking of the ice between members of the opposite sexes is a matter of much deeper moment and nicety. A man cannot lead off about race-borses, for fear of being set down as frivolous; nor can he go in for bonnets and laco, lest he should be stared at as impertinet and intrusive. He is actually compelled by stress of circumstances to commence with nothing in particular, and the art of discoursing on nothing in particular is one that demands consummate industry and aptitude. Some members of Parliament, as one sees, have got it, and ple of centralization. Just as every schoolboy in France can be made by telegraph to learn the same page in his geography at the same hour, it could be made part of the business of a hostess to assign subjects of universal conversation for every dance. Each couple all over the room would thus at the same instant be engaged upon the same theme, and nobody would ever run the risk of repeating at one part of the entertainment what had been said several times already before his turn arrived. The Monday Popular Concerts, the Queen's last drawingroom, and the Fenians would thus all of them have an equal chance, and in country places matters of local and of general interest might be neatly interwoven. If any young lady or any young Guardsman were brought by such a plan to cultivate their minds beforehand with a view to shining in the discussion, the arrangement would not, at any rate, have been in vain. An intellectual or scientific subject might be added, towards the close of the evening, for the benefit of Oxford and Cambridge undergradu ates, who at certain seasons of the year are at home in large numbers, and anxious naturally to distinguish themselves both in conversation and in the dance. Part of the present mischief arises from the unjust depreciation into which the weather, as a groundwork of discussion, has fallen of late. Nobody abroad talks about the weather, because abroad it is monotonously fine; but in bestowing upon Great Britain a fitful and changeful climate, Heaven has bestowed upon its inhabitants a permanent topic of discourse. Human ingratitude has led us unduly to disparage this great blessing, as we are tempted to disparage other benefits which are always within our reach. Before agreeing to abandon it, it might have been well to make quite sure that there was something to supply its place. It turns out, now that the weather has been discredited, that there is nothing anywhere at all like it for conversational purposes. If small talk has become proportionately hard, English people have only art From the London Review. THE FIDGETS. "THE fidgets" is one of those beautifully vague nouns, plural in form but singular in signification, of which there are several parallels among the list of the more vulgar diseases. The fidgets, the rickets, the snuffles, the staggers, the rheumatics these analogies ought to be sufficient to establish the class of the things to which the fidgets belong. But the fidgets is a moral as well as a physical disease, and in that double signification it stands alone from the others. But we cannot treat moral and physical fidgets altogether separately, inasmuch as the second is often the manifestation of the first. We would first remark that fidgets is the characteristic of some members of the animal kingdom. We go to the Zoological Gardens, and we are sure to see a coati mundi, or some such creature, incessantly promenading its cage without pausing for an instant. We look into our books, and we find that the guinea-pig of schoolboy life is properly called the restless cavy, as if nature were apologizing by such creations for the sluggishness of her sloth and the sleepiness of her dormouse. Well, let that pass and be discussed elsewhere as part of the great theory of compensation. But there are also human coati mundis who are never still for an instant. Of course, we accept the fidgetiness of children, we make up our minds to it, and when it is unbearable they retire to the nursery, while we are left in peace to ponder on what is probably a provision of nature for hardening into bone and muscle the cartilages and jellies of infancy. But we have not the power of turning a fidgetty man out of the room in that summary way. Yet how many of us have felt sometimes that hanging would be too good a death for the true peripatetic philosopher, whether he takes the shape of some one in the room with us, who walks up and down with his hands under his coat-tails, scrupulously stepping in the centro of each group of flowers on the brussels carpet; or whether, worse still, he lodges on the floor over our heads, and renders our life a mere burden by his measured footfall and the regular creak which one board gives during his promenade. Another most deadly form of fidgetiness, which is enough to try the patience of Job, is when some miscreant raises his heel from the ground, and bearing only on the springy ball of the foot, commences a low and rapid vibration. By-and-by, everything in the room seems to quiver responsively, and the general sense produced is that of occupying the stern berth of a steam-ship, and enjoying to the full the monotonous flutter of the screw propeller. The same miscreant, in a slightly calmer mood, occasionally changes his allegretto for an adagio movement, and, crossing his legs, slowly describes aërial figures with the toe of one boot. If, in addition to that, he drums a popular air upon his chin, his outrage on the human race is nearly perfect. But there is one form of the physical fidgets which ought to enlist our pity rather than our anger. It arises from some arrested circulation, we suppose, or some irritated nerve; but it is something really painful, and no mere expression of an ill-balanced mind. It attacks the sufferer very often in railway carriages, with a creeping sensation down the leg, giving the malaise of "pins and needles," without the sparkling accompaniment of the galvanic pricking. We are assured by the afflicted that the greatest salvation would be to kick vigorously one's vis-à-vis; and, failing that, the next best chance is to smuggle one's boots off, and stray up and down with surreptitious socks in the shadow of a portmanteau or rug. We are also informed that the same disease is frequently called into active life by the dread combination of a narrow pew and a long sermon; but there it is more hopeless than in a railway carriage, as the difficulties of kicking are more insupera ble, and there is no friendly "Bradshaw" to tell us at what hour and minute the preacher will shut off steam. But any forced quiet in one position reveals to us in a wonderful manner what a complicated tissue of nerves is spread over us. Perhaps during the few seconds in which our carte-de-visite is being taken we enjoy the concentrated fidgets of half a lifetime. We would give kingdoms to scratch the back of our head, and one rub at the nose would be cheaply purchased by the revenues of a dukedom; the desire to wink becomes the prime necessity of life, and it is slow death to defer swallowing another instant; but we are conscious that to swallow will depress the chin, and convey to posterity a false idea of our cselled features. Most photographs are photographs of the fidgets. It lurks in that uneasy constriction of the mouth, in that wandering look in the eye which the artist will touch out with Indian ink; but, above all, in the carriage of the hands, which are generally indicative of much mental torture. But moral fidgets must not be unsung. It very often happens that the physical expression implies the moral. But it is not always so. The moral fidgets are very wearing to the possessor, and very trying to those who live with him. Some persons are fidgety only about punctuality -or what they please to call punctuality. They insist on being at the railway station about three-quarters of an hour before the advertised time for the train; they address searching questions to every servant of the company whom they can catch, and find no comfort from any of the answers. If they are themselves passengers, they seem to see their own luggage prematurely landed at every station at which they stop, and they are torn with conflicting feelings as to the probability of their friends being at their journey's end to meet them. If, on the other hand, they are expecting a guest to arrive, and the train is five minutes late, they are plunged into a wild delirium, and their fervid imagination conjures up a scene of indescribable carnage in which the train, and most of the passengers, have been annihilated. Some persons are fidgety about dinner. They are on tenter-hooks during every course; having a conviction that some great catastrophe will ruin everything, or that the guests will not enjoy themselves. Some are fidgety about draughts and currents of air. They paste up their windows, and caulk their doors, and load the chimney with a truss of straw. They always sit under the lee of a folding screen, and are authentic upon the merits of sandbags. To them the keyhole is an orifice to be stopped with paper. One especial case we remember, in which fidgetiness was the parent of ingenuity. The cautious hypochondriac strained a number of threads tightly across his room, and hung upon them delicate strips of tissue paper, from the vibration of which he prepared a storm-chart of the draughts, and posted his chair in the calm centre of some eddying cyclone. Some folks are fidgety about barglars. In their ears the whole house after nightfall rings with suspicious sounds. The stairs creak beneath designing boots; the imprisoned moth is the quick whirr of the centre bit; the amorous area-cat is the signal whistle of a whole gang of marauders; there are Bill Sykeses under every bed, and a Hare and Burk in every hanging-closet. Miss Matey Jenkins in "Cranford" is one of the most charming members of this typical class. We recommend to all burglarphobes her expedient of rolling a penny ball under the bed, to see if it would emerge from the valance at the opposite side, or whether it could catch in the portly form of some prostrate housebreaker. But had our fidgety friend been May Queen on that memorable occasion, she would have appeared with an alpaca umbrella, and the servant would have been handy with goloshes and waterproofs. Such persons are hygrometers just as our friends who look out for draughts may be called anemometers. For in scorching summer days they always detect dew on the grass, or damp in the moss, or something of an aqueous tendency. The most advanced of this school go about with air cushions, and change their stockings at uncertain periods. There are many who are fidgety about their children; and this is in a measure pardonable. For the least observant can see that little ones are very sensitive instruments-soon up and soon down. But this may be carried to a height of absurdity, and much to the detriment of the poor children themselves, when parental solicitude becomes a persecution to the babes and a standing nuisance to friends and relations. The doctor thrives upon this fidgetiness, for he is summoned to pronounce on a flea-bite lest it should be chicken-pox; but sometimes the nursery becomes a dispensary, and the wretched child who sneezes has a mustard-plaster, and a fit of peevishness is treated with a gray powder. The same over-anxiety makes a bed of thorns for itself by an over-strained estimate of infantile peccadillos, which oftentimes, instead of being rated and treated as they deserved, are regarded as the darkest promise of future reprobacy; and the poor parent's heart is almost broken by the prospect. This touches the true principle of the moral fidgets. It consists in a disproportionate estimate of the importance of things; and while it causes much misery to ourselves and others, it is liable to the still graver charge of tempting us to reduce the weight of matters that really are of the last importance. We may indeed say, without irreverence, that there is such a thing as religious fidgets; a wide subject, which we will only suggest now without discussing, merely adding that we shall never have a more truthful description given of it than "straining at a gnat; " and we are all well aware that the readiness to "swallow a camel" waits very closely upon this frame of mind. OUR OLD TREES. There are as many the peaceful parish church-yard-attains a reoaks named after William the Conqueror as markable size and longevity. Numbers are to there are old, feudal towers attributed to Julius be found with a girth of twenty-five or twentyCæsar, and there are at least some trees to seven feet; and there is one at Ankerwyke, which even a higher antiquity may be indubita- near Windsor, which is believed to be 1,000 bly assigned. The oldest and largest tree of years old, and which, therefore, must have been which Windsor can boast is the "King Oak," flourishing in ripe maturity when King John which Loudon tells us is said to have been a was signing Magna Charta on the neighbouring favourite with the Conqueror when he enclosed Runnymede. Another famous yew grew near the forest. It is twenty-six feet in circumfer- Fountain's Abbey, whose age, as indicated by ence, and is supposed to be a thousand years the concentric rings of its trunk, must have been old. More famous still is the Win farthing oak about 1,214 years. Scientific deduction was in near Diss, in Norfolk, which, tradition asserts, this instance corroborated by history; for it is was known as "the old oak," even in the Con- on record that, while the abbey was being built queror's time. Immediately above the root its in 1133, the monks were accustomed to take circumference is seventy feet, and forty feet at shelter under it from the rain. Mention is likethe middle of the bole. According to the best wise made of another yew which, one would authorities this oak is believed to be not less think, must have been the Methuselah of its than 1,500 years old! Not many buildings now tribe, for its age, as was inferred from the usual existing, except in ruins, are so ancient as this structural evidence, reached back over a space tree. In the Conqueror's time it might well be of 2,880 years. Admitting this estimate to be called "old," for it had then seen some seven true, the tree must have been planted about the hundred summers. It was an old tree when time when Solomon began to reign in Israel. Alfred the Great was fighting the Danes and founding the English monarchy: in fact, it may be said to have lived through the whole "History of England." Another tree, the sobermantled yew-associated in our thoughts with The great botanist, De Candolle, believed that the age of the famous Baobab of the Cape de Verde Islands, whose circumference is 109 feet, reached far beyond the period mentioned..- Dr. Child's Benedicite. No. 1185. Fourth Series, No. 46. 16 February, 1867. ON THE RELATIONS WHICH ELECTRICITY SUSTAINS TO THE Causes of DISEASE. By S. Littell, M. D., Emeritus Surgeon of Wills Hospital for the Diseases of the Eye and Limb, Philadelphia. Read before the American Medical Association at its meeting in Boston, June, 1865, and now reprinted from its Transactions. 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