We have gone to some trouble to obtain the foregoing details of the open competitions for the scholarships annually given away by the city of Paris, and we are glad that we have succeeded. Their publication is all the more opportune as the municipal authorities of Paris have just decided to turn the Brothers out of their schools. We commend these figures to the notice of all who take any interest in the educational question, but more especially to those who think that religious teaching should be banished from the classroom.

The table speaks for itself. It is a glorious refutation of the aspersions and calumnies thrown out by the partisans of a godless education. The logic of such figures is telling. Thirty-one contests and thirty-one victories! Then again out of 1545 scholarships, 1231 (the lion's share) are won by the Brothers, leaving a balance of 314 to their opponents. The success is overwhelming. It places beyond cavil the superiority of the "clerical" schools, a superiority due in part to the masters and in part to their methods.

In the light of such facts we can well understand the praises bestowed on the Brothers by two great statesmen inter multos. One of these is Guizot. "I rejoice," says the historian of civilization, "to see the Brothers engaged in the work of education; by their devotedness, by their science, by their methods they will give a powerful impetus to true progress. Our industrial, artistic, and commercial classes will here find all the knowledge they require for their various careers in life." Now hear Thiers: "For many years I have been a supporter of the University, a systematic supporter. Well, I declare to-day that I would wish to see the Brothers not only in our cities, but in all our country towns and villages."

To the above we shall add just one testimony, viz., that of the London Times. It writes: "It would be difficult to find a body of men more self-sacrificing and better able to fulfil the task they have undertaken than the Brothers. Their affable ways, their excellent discipline, their talent for education, their thorough devotedness to their work commend them to the respect and admiration even of Protestants."

1 "Je me rejouis de voir les Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes dans le ministère de notre éducation; par leur dévouement, par leur science, par leur enseignement, ils donneront le branle au véritable progrès. Nos générations industrielles, artistiques et commerçantes trouveront ici tous les aliments intellectuels qui conviennent à leur vie, à leur destinée."

"J'ai été longtemps universitaire, systématiquement universitaire. Eh bien, je déclare aujourd'hui que je voudrais voir les Frères non pas seulement dans les villes, mais aussi dans tous les bourgs et tous les villages."

But the oft-defeated secularists differ toto cælo in opinion from Guizot, Thiers, and the Times. Their hopeless failures kindled their wrath and fanned it into flame. They cudgelled their brains for some means of putting down the Brothers, and at last they hit upon a plan, which to their mind must infallibly strip their irrepressible rivals of their prestige, and ultimately sound the deathknell. They cried out that the Brothers crammed their best boys, to the detriment of the less promising, and they confidently appealed to the University to inquire into the matter. The University did inquire into the matter by applying a test in the shape of a Certificat d'Etudes granted to all deserving scholars. The efficiency of a school was of course to be measured by the number of such certificates obtained. The first examination of the kind was held in 1869, on which occasion the Brothers simply doubled the average of the secular teachers. Similar results were obtained each succeeding year, as the following table shows :

The University test, which was intended to show up the tricks. of the Brothers and mathematically demonstrate the inferiority of their schools, thus defeated the hopes of its framers. It served only to make more patent and to give greater publicity to the marked superiority of the Christian schools. But if the secular teachers were everywhere checkmated, the partisans of secularism

-irate at their complete discomfiture-resolved to make a combined effort to repress their troublesome rivals. Unable to cope with them in the lists, unable to meet them in fair open fight, they have at last resorted to the argumentum ad baculinum, to brute force. The municipal council of Paris has already voted their expulsion, and several provincial towns have emulated the capital. At Blois and a few other places they have been literally ejected by the gens-d'armes. But the people stood by the instructors of their children, and on the very morrow of their ejection they were able to hold their classes in new premises, the scholars, to a boy, rallying round their persecuted masters. But this is not all. While ediles decree their suppression, deputies are busy contriving a piece of legal machinery (the scavenger's daughter of the nineteenth century) which will not merely hamper but effectively cripple and crush the offensive Brotherhood. While we are going to press these warm friends (?) of liberty are engaged upon a schedule to subject the Brothers to military service. If this bill pass the Chambers the cassock will have to be thrown aside for the uniform, and the school abandoned for the barracks. Such a measure, we have reason to think, would be productive of disastrous results for the main body of the institute.

We consider the fiery ordeal through which the Brothers in France are now passing as one of the finest pages in their history. We certainly admired their bravery on the battle-field which forced a general to cry out to them that humanity and charity did not require them to venture so far, and induced another to dismount in order to embrace one of them whom he met under the enemy's guns; we certainly admired the retiring modesty they displayed when the French Academy awarded them the prize offered by the city of Boston for the noblest deeds of patriotism accomplished during the Franco-Prussian War; and we admired them again the other day when they went up to receive from the chief of the State the rewards they had won at the Paris Exhibition, viz., five gold, five silver, and three bronze medals; but we say without hesitation that they appear to us more worthy of admiration now on account of the persecution which their brilliant scholastic results have brought down upon them. It is because they are the leaders of popular education, because they are too successful, because they totally eclipse the secularists that they are marked out for destruction. They must now expiate their grand educational triumphs. It is here their death-warrant is signed, but it is equally true that quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat. That the demagogues are demented few will deny, who read our daily papers. They are infuriated against what they disdainfully call "clericalism," and

resort to excessive measures to check and extirpate it. They forget the warning which one of their own conveys to them in the line,

Le trône a succombé par excès de puissance.

They never cease talking about liberty and the augurating; but their liberty is a grinding tyranny. will be their ruin.

era they are inTheir excesses

But while the Order is persecuted in France, it continues to extend and prosper in other countries. Spain has just welcomed its first colony of Brothers, and the Moslems of Jerusalem have shown no aversion to their sable costume. In England they scarcely muster a hundred members, and yet have several extensive establishments. In Liverpool they have taken out government certificates, and the Blue Books show that Her Majesty's inspectors give them excellent reports. In London they have a college where young men are prepared for public examinations, and especially for the University of London.

It is only thirty years since the first pioneers of the Order came over to our shores, and already there are over 1200 Brothers scattered throughout the country from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, from New York to San Francisco. Here, as in France, they devote themselves with energy to their great and laborious work, and it is gratifying to notice the marked success that everywhere attends their efforts.

The Order thus continues in every clime its grand educational traditions, and in every land reaps the same harvest of results. We cordially say floreat semper.

A

RECENT PROGRESS IN STELLAR PHYSICS.

S a witness of unparalleled progress in all sciences, especially those which are termed experimental, the present century stands pre-eminent. No proof of this assertion is demanded, for the astounding progress of the age has become so trite and commonplace an expression that it is in every one's mouth. What giant strides in the science of the day do not steam and electricity mark? Our fathers in their boyhood days felt not the absence of these two useful agents; but how could we survive their loss? Photography, too, and the thousand discoveries in modern chemistry as applied to the arts and to agriculture, manifest the wonderful advance of science.

Astronomy, likewise, in its experimental features, can boast of following, or I should say rather of leading other sciences in the onward march of progress; a superiority due, in no slight degree, to the perfection and ingenuity exhibited in our modern instruments of celestial research. To mention a few familiar facts will be a sufficient voucher for the statement. Since the year 1800, when Piazzi discovered the first, all that group of celestial bodies termed asteroids, forming, according to Bode's law, the "missing link" between the planets Mars and Jupiter, has been added to our store of astronomical knowledge. In the Smithsonian Report for 1876 the number of these dwarf planets noted up to that date is given as 172; the last, if I mistake not, discovered in July by Professor Peters, of Clinton, N. Y., is the 200th in the list.

Again, the mathematical prophecy by Leverrier of Neptune's existence, and its subsequent discovery are familiar to all our readers. Then there is Professor Hall's discovery of Mars's satellites in August, 1877; and Professor Watson's glimpse of at least one intra-mercurial planet obtained on July 29th, 1878. Tables, also, of all the planets, together with that of our own satellite, have been carefully compiled, studied, and corrected. Besides, the periodical nature of comets has been ascertained, and the time of revolution of several of these erratic wanderers from the influence of other solar centres has been calculated and confidently predicted.

But to approach nearer our subject-the stars; in stellar astronomy, as distinct from astronomy in general, important results have been reached. Very correct stellar charts or maps have been completed after a careful and laborious study of ancient and modern catalogues; the most renowned among the latter being Lalande's, Argelander's, Rümker's, Baily's, Airy's, Weisse's, Groombridge's, Johnson's, Carrington's, and Santini's. The distribution of the stars has been more exactly studied, and their number comVOL. IV.-42