NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 243, 20 March 1875, Page 3

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

{From the Spectator.') Chili shares in the ecclesiastical disturbances now so marked all over the world. The Catholic Church has hitherto been the only one tolerated in Chili, but opinion has become hostile to the priests, and the party in power have proposed to the people to separate Church and State, to compel civil marriage—allowing, of course, any subsequent religious ceremony—to enforce civil registration of births and deaths, and to place all cemeteries under civil officers. At the recent elections, these proposals have been carried by a large majority, and the next Congress will legislate in this sense. Mexico is also about to adopt the disestablishment solution of the question, which will probably be accepted everywhere in Spanish America except in Ecuador, where the Republican Government is as Ultramontane as Mgr. Capel. The semi-official North German Gazette has discovered that the New York Herald has a principle, and has published the fact to a surprised world. The object of that journal, which Americans had always believed to be circulation, is really TJltramontanism, and its means is to calumniate the German Empire. It has entered into a conspiracy with Count Amino, who is about twice as Protestant as Prince Bismarck, to do that. Imagine the Herald?& " headings" when that folly reaches New York. " Bismarck denounces the Herald?' " The Herald shaking the German Empire." " Bennett classed with Arnim." Why, the Herald would pay the North- German Gazette double its income for such an advertisement per diem.

The discussion as to the precise nature of the sense which brought the male tigermoths to the gauze cagejof the female tigermoth, and which brings the vultures from all quarters to a dead carcass, was continued in the Times by Dr Bree, who maintains that it must be smell, because the moths will only find out the presence of a female to windward of them, and not of cne to leeward; and'that vultures often miss a carcass in which decomposition has not begun—a fact for which he quotes the eminent naturalist Charles Waterton—but never one in which decay is already at work. This last assertion, however, Air Fitzjaraes Stephen disproves in Thursday's Pall Mall, showing by his own experience in India that vultures do collect in large numbers even before the dying creature which is to be their prey is actually dead, and he accounts for it by the sense of sight, holding that the vultures patrol the heavens at a great height, and that when one sees a possible dinner and swoops down upon it, the others are guided by his change of movement, which from their height in the air they can always detect. But surely neither smell nor sight will explain the unerring line of flight of the migrating swallows or other birds? Nor is either Mr Stephen's or Dr Bree's explanation sufficient to account for the instinct by which a cat or dog finds its way straight home for forty miles or more over a completely unknown country, Mr Stephen's explanation being obviously inapplicable, and Dr Bree's, who sticks to it that it is by smell, being open to the criticism that, if that be the true explanation, such a feat clearly could never be achieved when the lost home is to leeward of the animal who makes the journey. There is evidently still a secret beyond the scope of all these explanations. On the 21st November we made a remark on certain letters sent by Mr William Milton to the Times, with the view of proving that the Parliament of 1661 entirely overruled the wishes of Convocation as to the revised Rubrics, and especially as to the rubric affecting the place of the Communiontable and the position of the celebrant. We ■are bound to admit that a long letter by a well-known High-Church clergyman, the Rev Thomas W. Perry, Vicar of Ardleigh, Colchester, appears to have upset Mr Milton's assertion that Parliament overruled Convocation in the matter, and to show that the chief alterations discussed and rejected were alterations discussed and rejected by Convocation itself, and not by Parliament. Not the less, however, does it seem to be clear that the reason why Parliament made no alterations in the Prayer-book, was that Convocation had in its discretion already wisely rejected the proposed alterations, which it was pretty certain that Parliament would have declined to accept,—and, amongst these, the alteration which would have placed the Communion-table in the east end of the chancel, and substituted "the north part" for " the north end " of the table in defining the position of the celebrant. Parliament apparently did not snub Convocation, only because Convocaticn was too prudent to lay itself open to a Parliamentary snub. Dr Appleton has been successful in getting his strenuous advocacy of the " Endowment of Research" referred to even in the Times, which took up the cudgels not so much to condemn what he proposes as to defend what he attacks. However, the controversy has not as yet assumed a very useful form for the purposes Dr Appleton has in view—for which, we think, he has chiefly himself to thank. It has taken instead the form of a discussion as to whether it is a profitable thing for the nation that Universities should be endowed whether it would not be much better, both for the teacheis and for the learners, that the University'teachers should be paid in the ordinary way, just as barristers or physicians are paid, out of the means of those who want to see their children learned. We confess, while we are inclined to adopt Dr Appleton's view on the question of the Endowment of Research—so soon as he and his friends can make out that it is really practicable to find a good test of powers of research that deserve endowment we differ from him toto ccelo on this secondary creed of his, which hehaanowinjudiciously made the battle-field of his movement—that the learning of the nation would not suffer by leaving academical teaching to be paid by thelaw of supply and demand. Inouropinion, academical teaching, though enforced by University prestige,'would be freely dispensed with by a very considerable number of young men who now obtain it, but have no means to pay either for legal or medical education. Dr Appleton has indeed shifted his ground into the enemy's country ; but we fear he has invited disaster by his rash strategy.