NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE newspapers have continued to appear during the week, but they have not contained news, unless letters on Indian Archmo- logy, the reports of meetings of Associated Chambers of Commerce, evidence about the Thorpe accident, reiterated for the fourth time, and ecclesiastical mares'-nests concerning Electors of Saxony who have been buried for hundreds of years, can be properly so termed. There has been a Congress in Belgium, which must surely be generic rather than specific in its character, its title seeming to imply that it is its mission to classify the sub- jects of all the other thousand Congresses of our age, and reduce the mighty maze to something like a plan. It is called "The International Yarn Congress." It met at Brussels on Tuesday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs being chosen honorary President, and its object is said to be to establish a "uniform system of numbering and classifying yarns,"—surely a very requi- site, but also a very difficult task. The yarns of the different sorts of Congresses, though all of them too long, are so dif- ferent in kind as to make satisfactory classification a very hard task. Perhaps the yarns of the International Congress of Peace and Fraternity are the longest and thinnest, those of the International Working-men's Association the harshest and brittlest, and those of the International Statisticians the driest and fuzziest ; but it would puzzle the wisest of men to classify such yarns as those of the International Postal Congress, the International Congress for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the International Congress of Orientalists, the Inter- national Congress of Meteorologists, and a hundred others. We hope, however, that the Congress for Classifying Yarns will not add to its own difficult work by also spinning them.
