sons in prisons with more hardened criminals, where all the influences are demoralizing and not one healthful—the ordinary course—is obviously not the best one or a good one in any way. Prof. McClatchie, on the other hand, looking upon the cases as involving moral disease, outlines a reformatory treatment based on principles similar to those which rule at the Elmira institution. The first precept to be observed in it is that first offenses should never be overlooked; vigorous treatment in the beginning is really a kindness to the subjects. Next, a system of graded institutions is needed, so that prisoners may be classified and segregated. "Those guilty of different degrees of criminality should be placed in different institutions and given entirely different treatment. The sentence should in all cases be what is called indeterminate—that is, no one should be sentenced for any given time. He should be placed in the institution and should remain there until competent men pronounce him cured. The treatment should all be disciplinary. It should not consist of simply kind treatment, but should be firm and vigorous. All three of their natures—their physical, mental, and moral—must be treated simultaneously." The discipline must be continued until it is easy for the subjects to control their will and to use their hands and their minds in the right manner. "They must form the habit of doing right until it has become a part of their nature, or the work will not be thoroughly done. . . . If it is found that it is impossible to reform the criminal, he should be kept confined indefinitely."
St. Augustine and the Days of Creation.—St. Augustine of Hippo is said to have been a diligent student of the Mosaic record of the creation, and tried earnestly to find a method of interpreting it consonant with what he knew of the facts of Nature. In writing of this feature of his career the Rev. John A. Zahm, of the University of Notre Dame, says that during the twenty-five best years of his life the first two chapters of Genesis were continually before his mind. What did Moses mean by the word "days"? he asked again and again. "How could there be days in the ordinary acceptation of the word before the sun was created on the fourth day? Were not the first three days mentioned by Moses periods of time rather than ordinary days of twenty-four hours each? And what about the seventh day—a day that had no evening—a day, therefore, that still endures? How explain, according to the laws of Nature, which are the laws of God, the production and development of the various forms of plant and animal life in the short period of six ordinary days? The idea that God, during the days of Genesis, operated in a manner different from that which subsequently characterized his providence, that the laws which governed the material universe were not the same then that they were afterward; that the Hexaëmeron was distinguished by a series of miracles and a succession of specific creations rather than by the reign of law that the Creator himself had imposed on matter, and by which it was endowed with the power of gradual evolution and differentiation, seemed so repugnant to the keen and logical intellect of Augustine that he could never bring himself to adopt it, much less give it his support. . . . The word 'days,' according to the illustrious doctor, was not to be taken in a literal but in a figurative sense. They meant not ordinary days, but the works of creation which were unfolded in time by a series of progressive transformations. For a similar reason the words 'evening' and 'morning' are to be interpreted metaphorically as meaning not dusk and dawn, but the beginning and end of the divine works. God, according to St. Augustine, as well as according to St. Gregory of Nyssa, first created matter in an elementary or nebulous state. From this primordial matter—created ex nihilo (from nothing)—was evolved, by the action of physical laws impressed on it by the Creator, all the various forms of terrestrial life that subsequently appeared. In this process of evolution there was a succession, but no division of time. The Almighty completed the work he had begun, not intermittently and by a series of special creations, but through the agency of special causes, by the operation of natural laws—causas rationes—of which he was the author."
Wabbling of the Earth.—Displacements of the rotational axis of the earth, says Prof. Forster in a paper read in the British Asso-
