CURRENT LITERATURE.
There is nothing specially interesting in the February number of the Universal Review, unless it be a very instructive paper by Mr. R. Donald on the population of France. It appears that it has for a very long period been hereditary with Frenchmen to have no children, and now the birth-rate is so low (2-07 children for each family), that but for the great foreign immigration, the population would positively decline. Even this birth-rate exceeds the truth, the per-tentage of households which have four children being mostly found among the immigrants. In two million households there are no children, in two millions and a half only one child, and in two millions and a quarter only two. The number of foreigners, which increases rapidly, amounted in 1886 to 1,126,531, and M. Pradon, Chairman of the Special Committee on the subject, believes this to be only half the truth, the immigrants returning themselves as Frenchmen. M. Lagneau recently read before the Academy of Medicine apaper stating that French population was retrograding, and that at the present rate every hundred families would in the next generation have declined to eighty-three.—Mrs. Annie Besant, of all people in the world, pleads the cause of the Bop= of Bhopal in a paper full of en- venomed attacks upon Sir Lepel Griffin. We fancy his account of the intrigues in the Bhopal Court would be a very different one, and probably much more accurate. We always thought, till we read this paper, that to say of an Indian lady that she was purdah nusheen was honorific, the phrase, which means " behind the cur- tain," being used to imply good social position. Sir L. Griffin, if he used it as a term of reproach to the Begum, :must have meant that she was above such a restrictive etiquette, as, being a Sovereign, she undoubtedly was.—Mr. Lewis Morris has a rather poor poem on an incident of the Armada, and there is an amazing copy of verses on Prince Rudolph's death. It is positive doggrel, as witness the concluding lines :- " God of mercy ! not so! Thou wilt look below,
Thou wilt watch thy humanity struggle and grow As upwards it turns its despairing gaze, Thou wilt pity thy human created maze ; Thou wilt see that a Prince is but man in his day :
Prince, Peasant, and Pauper but pass the same way."
—There is a very able though rather technical paper by Mr. H. C. Burdett, called " Our Great Gun Muddle," which certainly seems to prove that the system of furnishing war materiel works as badly MI possible, the responsibility being divided, until it is possible for the Admiralty to declare, as it did on March 11th, 1887: (a) The Admiralty has no information as to the number of rounds of ammunition in store for the various types of guns in the naval service. (b) The Admiralty has no information as to the stock available of fuzes, tubes, &c., and all other essential items for the proper service of guns. (c.) The Admiralty has no means of ascer- taining how much the stock in hand of warlike material for naval service has been increased or diminished from year to year." That single sentence, if it is still true, is enough to condemn the system, which, indeed, is condemned, but never gets reformed.
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