hundred miles in length, and the greatest breadth
from thirty to thirty-five miles. It is eighteen
hundred and fifty feet above the sea level, but
two thousand feet lower than the northern Lake
Nyanza. This, of course, makes it impossible
that there can be any rivers flowing—as used
to be supposed of the Nile—from the southern
and through the northern lake. Indeed, Burton
supposes that no river flows from Tanganyika
Lake, but that it receives the drainage of the
country around. The beauty of the lake, and of
its shores seems to be very great. It has the
"laughing tides" of the Mediterranean,
"pellucid sheets of dark blue water; purple light,
crimson and gold, tufted heights, and at night
floods of transparent moonbeam."

Taking a more prosaic view of it, we cannot
help thinking that it might be made a great
high road of commerce, that is of civilisation,
for the people living on the shores are nearly all
traders, and cannot exist without some form of
traffic. They have boats, but these are nothing
better than wretched canoes which creep along
the shores, and only when the weather promises
to be fine venture to make a desperate push for
the other side. The Arabs collect slaves and ivory
from the tribes upon its banks, and they formerly
raised rice of excellent quality upon the shores;
but the inhabitants were wearied out by the
depredations of the monkey, the elephant, and the
hippopotamus, and allowed it to degenerate.
On the western shores of the lake, the crocodiles,
the malaria, the mosquitoes, and the men
are equally feared. The latter prefer man raw,
instead of eating him roasted like other tribes,
and, having a land of richest soil and most
prolific climate, they abandon it to wild growths,
and feed on all kinds of carrion and vermin,
grubs and insects, and, failing these, on man.

MEDICAL NUTS TO CRACK.

Many a tough riddle is put to the doctor in
a court of law. There are more than twenty
thousand inquests held every year in England
and Wales, an average of more than one inquest
a year to every practitioner of medicine; at
each, the professional witness is expected with
his facts and opinions, to show the cause of death,
or to fix crime upon the guilty.

Sometimes even to know one man from another
is a riddle, that it takes more than a doctor to
solve. Mall, a barber's apprentice, was tried
once at the Old Bailey for robbing a Mr. Ryan,
of Portland-street. All the witnesses swore
positively against him, and he would have been
found guilty, if it had not been proved that,
at the very time of the robbery, he was standing
at the same Old Bailey bar on trial for
another robbery, sworn against him as
positively, which also he did not commit. He was
the unlucky double of a thief.

If he had only had a mole or a strawberry leaf!
says the expert reader of romances. Well,
there was a man, named Joseph Parker, tried at
New York for bigamy, because, besides being
himself and having his own wife, he was
supposed to be Thomas Hoag, husband of Mrs.
Hoag. Thomas Hoag might be known surely
enough, for he had a scar on his forehead. So
had Parker. Yes, and Hoag spoke with a lisp.
So did Parker. He had a curious mark on
his neck. So had Parker. He had a scar on
his foot. No, Parker had not got that, and the
want of the scar on the foot supported his
alibi, and proved the mistake of identity.

There is a notion among Belgian thieves that
a salt herring tied over a scar will in time efface
it. There was not time for a scar to form in the
case of a French thief, who cut his hand with a
window pane, when leaving a house he had
robbed. He was traced by the drops of blood,
which were observed to be on the left side of the
footprints. On the way there was picked up
what the doctor pronounced to be a shred of
skin. Search was made in a village, where the
track was lost, and a man found with a recent
cut on his left hand, and a morsel of skin gone
from it, that in size and shape, said the two
doctors who were called in, answered to that
which had been picked up in the road. Hair
can be dyed, as we know, and blanched. As to
the blanching, great question was raised in
Paris when M. Orfila, the famous chemist,
together with one of the first hairdressers in the
town, was summoned to say whether it was
possible that a murderer, who had been seen in
Paris at two o'clock, with jet black hair, could
have been seen with light hair at Versailles on the
same evening. There was no wig in the case.
The hairdresser said this was impossible. Orfila
made experiments, and said that it could have
been managed by help of chlorine, which changes
black hair to dark and light chesnut, dark and
light blond yellow and yellowish white, according
to the length of time it had been steeped or
washed. In the case in question, if there was
no mistake as to the absence of a wig, and
the chlorine was used, the man must have put
himself to the penance of soaking the whole
crown of his head for some hours in chlorine
water—washing would have been insufficient—
and, after all, he could not have got rid of the
smell; besides that, his hair after the operation
would have been hard, stiff, and brittle. For
turning light hair dark, the means are easier.
The preparation of lead, known as tinctura
pompeiana of the shop, does not injure the hair,
and cannot affect the brains of those who use it,
a very slight absorption of more lead being of
little consequence to the whole mass. A little
dilute nitric acid dropped upon hair dye in this
way, causes the colour to fly off in effervescence.
Hair changes colour in some trades. Those who
turn rulers of " green ebony," or work where a
fine copper dust is in the air, if they have light
hair, find it changed to green.

Another question sometimes raised in cases of
disputed identification is, how much light is
enough to know a man by? A thief's face has
been seen in a dark chamber, and remembered
to identification and conviction, when, attention
having first been excited by the noise of his
movement, he was revealed for less than a