is taken with a necklace of seventeen bone
beads, and a silver padlock and seal, with an
attached medal, having on one side the child's
number, and on the other side an effigy of St.
Vincent de Paul. This necklace must not be
unfastened till the child is six years old.
Besides the nursery are a sick ward and a surgical
ward, a shelter for the boys who, after their
nursing in village homes, have come back to be
redistributed or apprenticed, and a like lodging
for girls, each with a playground. There is a
gymnasium and a large kitchen garden. There
are offices, stables, cow-houses, eight cows being
kept to supply milk for the establishment, and
a morsel of forest land—in Paris, within a
stone's throw of the Observatory—adjoins the
girls' playground. In this little wood, nurses
and babies sit on the grass, nightingales sing
on summer evenings, and hither the elder
children, always under close superintendence, come
in brigades for air and recreation. But the
distribution of the children into homes among poor
families of the provinces, with a retention of
strict check and oversight, is a very sound part
of the Paris foundling system.

In the Rue St. Jacques the old Seminary of
St. Magloire is now the Imperial Deaf and
Dumb Asylum for Boys, two hundred and fifty
in number, who are elaborately managed, and
after receiving four years of primary education,
are during the next three years taught trades.
Parents of fair means pay forty pounds a year
to the asylum when they wish a deaf and dumb
child of their own to be as well educated as its
infirmity permits.

The old, the infirm, and the mad, are grouped
in two vast establishments—the Salpêtrière,
which is the asylum for old women, and the
Bicêtre, which is the asylum for old men. Of
the insane in France, forty-six per cent are in
state or departmental asylums entirely devoted
to them, twenty-four per cent are in private
asylums, and the other thirty per cent form
groups in the asylums of the aged.

The Salpêtrière first came into life as an
asylum rather more than two centuries ago, when,
in the year sixteen hundred and fifty-three, some
of the poor beggars of the city and suburbs of
Paris were received into the old building known
as the Little Arsenal, then used as a manufactory
of saltpetre, or salpêtrière. Cardinal
Mazarin has left word to us that it cost forty thousand
livres to adapt the buildings as an
establishment, with something less than five hundred
beds for the use of the poor. The buildings
were considerably enlarged in the time of Louis
the Fourteenth; since then, addition after addition
has been made. In eighteen 'twenty-three
the place was re-named the Asylum for Old
Women, and, as regards the mad women, it is
here that Pinel and Esquirol, breaking through
many horrible old traditional beliefs, began the
right and humane treatment of the insane. There
are now in the Salpêtrière forty-five district buildings,
covering a population of more than five
thousand persons, and maintained by an annual
expenditure of about eighty thousand pounds.

The Bicêtre, now occupied by the poor old
men and male pauper lunatics of Paris, was
originally a castle built by Jean de Pointoise,
Bishop of Winchester. The name was soon
corrupted into Wicestre, and that into Bicêtre.
The ruined castle was, in Cardinal Mazarin's
time, a refuge for foundlings, and for poor old
men and pauper lunatics. It was there, by the
way, that in seventeen 'ninety-two the newly
invented guillotine was first tried on a corpse.
The Bicêtre, like the Salpêtrière, has grown by
successive additions and changes, and improvements
are still going forward in its buildings,
which are grouped about nine open courts. Its
roofs cover a population of more than three
thousand, at a cost for each of about
sixteen-pence a day, which is fourpence a day
more than the cost of each woman in the
Salpêtrière.

A warehouse for the clothes and linen used
in the Parisian hospitals and asylums is known
as the " Filature des Indigents." It is housed
in the old hospital of the Charité Notre-Dame,
suppressed during the late revolution. This
house distributes spinning work to nearly a
thousand old women, of whom the best worker
cannot earn more than sevenpence halfpenny,
and the majority earn only about fourpence a
day.

In the Rue de Sèvres is the Asylum for
Incurable women. The Asylum for Incurable
Men is at the old barracks in the Rue
Popincourt. But at Ivry, where the Assistance
Publique has land, the two are to be united in a
building with two thousand beds, half of the
number for the men, half for the women. The
Home for Incurable Women owes its existence
to the charity of Margurite Rouille, wife of a
counsellor of the Châtelet, who gave to the
Hôtel-Dieu, in the year sixteen 'thirty-two, a
large property, on the condition that a house
should be built on it as the Asylum for the Poor
Incurables of Saint Marguerite. About the
same time Cardinal la Rochefoucauld founded a
like establishment on the Sèvres road, and in
the present establishment the two foundations
are united. The incurables have very comfortable
quarters, and, if able, may go freely out and
in at all hours of the daylight.

These are the chief institutions that represent
the great Parisian system of poor relief. At this
time of year, when winter winds begin to whistle
round street corners, that system is in its fullest
activity. The twenty bureaus begin to see
about the distributing of winter clothing, the
little sisters of the poor beg with fresh energy
for their five houses full of old people, the
benevolent society that redeems clothes and
tools out of pawn comes Into full activity, the
allowances ot permanent relief rise to their
highest level, and in Paris as in London the
rich are especially reminded of their duties to
the poor. If some of the functionaries who
dispense our English poor-relief, and who are
for ever sounding the praises of local self-
government on a cracked fiddle with one string,
were a little more steadily and sternly