The autumn concourses have begun. The Queen has 'in- augurated'
a new statue of the Prince Consort at Coburg with a considerable English attendance in the town. The fete to the French fleet at Portsmouth has attracted great crowns. And our studies are beginning to be even more sociable than our amuse- ments. The Archasologicar Association has been spreading itself about in the neighbourhood of Durham, visiting old Roman altars to the Dolychene Jupiter and hearing discourses on the Roman ancestryof the N evilles. The International Social Science Association, with many English members, has just assembled at Berne. Next week the British Association is to have the most brilliant and dis- tinguished meeting it ever held, at Birmingham, and in October the Social Science Association is to have one almost as brilliant and distinguished at Sheffield. Besides this there has been a working men's exhibition opened in Birmingham by Lord Lyttel- ton, and in Wakefield by Lord Houghton. We are becoming a. sociable people. There are evidently no autumn amusements more popular than opportunities for the "concourse of fortuitous atoms."
