EDITORIAL GLEANINGS.
San Pete County, Utah, offers a rich market for Grasshoppers, for, as the 'New York Times' observes, men, women, and children are engaged from daylight until dark in collecting the pests and shipping them to the cities. The market price is one dollar a bushel, and there seems to be no limit to either the supply or demand. Millions of the insects darken the sun and hover over the gardens and fields, threatening destruction to everything in their pathway. An area comprising 1,800 square miles, in the centre of the richest agricultural section of Utah, is infested by the Grasshoppers. Sections of soil under microscopic test show seventy-six Grasshopper eggs deposited in a piece only two inches square. This is the situation in an entire mountain-walled valley, including fifteen prosperous towns, having a combined population of 20,000 people. The insects are everywhere that they can crawl or fly, and have destroyed the wheat and oat fields, and will soon strip the grasses and trees of every sign of vegetation. The average daily harvest of men and women ranges about thirty bushels of the insects. These are held in "gunny sacks," and measured or guessed as to quantity, and the money paid without a murmur. Business men and farmers have contributed to a fund for the extermination of the Grasshoppers, and have all the people they can secure at work picking them from the grain fields. When a collection of sacks is made the mass is burned on the streets amid the shouts of young and old gathered about the bonfires.—St. James's Gazette.
The little Scottish town of Cromarty has recently celebrated the centenary of the birth of Hugh Miller, son of a Cromarty fisherman, by early profession himself a stone-mason. The observation he had exercised as a stone-mason, and the attention which he had since devoted to geological studies, were embodied in 1841 in 'The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field,' a book which may fairly be said to have made a deep impression in both the scientific and literary worlds. Written in a stately, lucid style, with vivid passages which proved an eye-to-eye acquaintance with his subject, its con-
