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poetry. They are, therefore, excluded from these cheap evening gatherings. Why should this be? Is it not possible to have village readings on "Nature's common things," in which all classes can be amused and instructed? I venture to say that, if once an effort was made to render popular the philosophy of natural laws in every day country objects we should find the labourer desert the beer-shop for the reading-room. "Talpa" (Mr. Chandos Wren Hoskyns) has shown us how amusing "The Chronicles of a Clay Farm" may be made; and the profound Faraday, when he lectured on a farthing candle, proved that the science involved in one of the commonest objects of daily use could be made as excitingly interesting as the highest wrought sensational novel. I am satisfied that, if the educated gentry of the country would now and then extend their interest in the direction indicated, by communicating information on any common object which they may thoroughly understand—it should, however, be a condition that the information should be fundamentally sound—they would not only instruct the uneducated of the village, but they would impart knowledge to their own class, which would be eagerly seized and reciprocated. Science would thus gain ground in rural districts in the most pleasing way, and we should not meet with the ignorance one daily encounters, when the horse-keeper emphatically assures you that his horses prefer to drink water from a pond receiving the drainage of the stable, or when the cows man asserts that his stock are all the better for living in a low-lofted, crowded shippon, in which there is hardly room to stand up or space for all his cows to lie down at the same time; or when the ploughman tells you that clay soils are so stiff that water cannot