Spanish Coast has )

a most unenviable reputation for shipwrecks, which it owes to five great defects. (1) It has dangerous currents, such as helped to wreck H.M.S. “Serpent," the “ Roumania,” the " Tnnacria,” the “Utopia,” and many other ve els and on the Atlantic side there are also very strong tides. (2) On the north and north-west it is very rugged, and yet very badly supplied with lighthouses —some of them being practically behind hills, "to shelter them from the violence of the “ Atlantic" I (3) It is very badly supplied with harbours, partly because the currents close the openings on the north and north-west, and partly because elsewhere there are scarcely any openings at all to make into harbours. The enormous ma es of magnetic iron in the (4) Galician mountains are said to affect the coin pa of pa ing ships. Very few of the harbours have good communication (5) inland. the Thracian gladiator, Instigated and led the Servile War, or revolt of the slaves in Italy, in 73-71 B.C. He had been compelled to serve, like other barbarians, in the Roman army, from which he had deserted. Being made prisoner, he was sold as a slave, and placed in the gladiatorial school at Capua with 200 other Thracian, German, and Gaulish slaves and they formed a conspiracy, effected their escape,; and before long Spartacus was the leader of 60,000 men. Two armies were sent in succe ion against him, but he defeated them both, and led his forces towards Rome. In this crisis, Licinius Cra us (afterwards a triumvir) hemmed in the revolted slaves near Rhegium. Spartacus broke through the enemy at night, and retreated but eventually had to encounter the army of Cra us,; and he fell fighting. Faults IN, are generally of five kinds. (1) Inexperience often makes a speaker either too loud or too low. (2) Negligence or nervousne makes him indistinct. The formation of the mouth helps to make him (3) too slow or too rapid. An unmusical ear makes him too uniform or too (4) irregular. Affectation makes him adopt a peculiar (5) intonation, e.g. the drawling lisp of sentimental curates. Gravity is the relative weight of any body or substance considered with regard to an equal bulk of some other body which is a umed as a standard of comparison. The standard for the specific gravities of liquids and solids is pure distilled water at the temperature of 62° Fahrenheit, which is reckoned unity. By comparing the weights of equal bulks of other bodies with this standard we obtain their specific gravities. Thus, the specific gravity of cast iron is 7*2i, that means that any particular ma of cast-iron will weigh 7 ’21 times as much as an equal bulk of water. The practical rule is to weigh the body in the air, and then in pure distilled "water, and the former weight divided by the latter will give the specific gravity of the body. In gases the standard of unity (for designating the specific gravities) is atmospheric air. Heat is the term applied to the quantity of heat required to raise equal weights of different substances through equal intervals of temperature. Water is taken as the standard substance in measuring quantities of heat. The ‘specific heat' (or thermal capacity) of unit ma of a substance is identical with the ratio of the thermal capacity of any ma of the substance to that of an equal ma of water, because the thermal capacity of unit ma of cold water is unity, and the number denoting the thermal capacity of a body expre es also the ma of water which has an equivalent thermal capacity to that of the body. are supposed to have been invented by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. In long-sighted ersons the defect of the eye must be counteracted y convex lenses, and in short-sighted ones by concave lenses. ‘Periscopic’ spectacles have been invented also, in order to allow considerable latitude of motion to the eyes without fatigue. is the oblong figure, or stripe, formed on a wall by a beam of light, as of the sun, received through a narrow slit, pa ed through a prism, and thus separated into its constituent rays. It is coloured from red at one end, through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, to violet at the other the colours being due, of course, to the different constituents; of which solar light is made up, and the stripe itself is formed by an indefinite number of images of the slit ranged in order and partially overlapping. Besides the coloured rays the spectrum contains thermal (or heating) rays, and chemical rays which are invisible