share in my anxiety; a complacent look of
assurance on their faces seemed to say that there
were ten chances to one against the elk; we
had already gone at double-quick for half an
hour, when the baying of the dog sounded louder
and more plainly. The elk, then, was at bay.

"Yes, you go first, and fire straight,"
intimated rather than said the hunter.

A couple of cartridges were quickly thrust
into my breech-loader. Cautiously proceeding
up a steep bank, I peeped over the top, where
the elk was at bay. Yes, there he was, stamping
and dashing at the little dog with his horns
and long fore feet: who, however, easily avoided
the elk, as he kept dodging about in close
proximity to his nose.

An easier mark could hardly be imagined, so,
raising my rifle and aiming at the shoulder, I
put in a bullet at about forty yards' distance,
and the great animal fell over on his side dead.
I shall never forget my excitement—indeed, the
hunter, I am sure, thought I was mad, especially
when, in an exuberant fit of generosity, I
presented him with a five-dollar note.

In my opinion, there is much more sport in
hunting elk after the Norwegian manner, than
after the Swedish, as described in Lloyd's
interesting book of sport. To see a good hunter and
his dog at work is a sight not to be seen every
day, and the memory of it will long abide by me.

FAT PEOPLE.

WHAT is the average weight of a man?
At what age does he attain his greatest weight?
How much heavier are men than women?
What would be the weight of fat people;
and what of very fat people?

M. Quetelet, of Brussels, some years ago,
deemed such questions quite within the scope
of his extensive series of researches on man
(Sur l'Homme, et le Développement de ses
Facultés.) He got hold of everybody he could,
everywhere, and weighed them all. He weighed
the babies, he weighed the boys and girls, he
weighed the youths and maidens, he weighed
men and women, he weighed collegians, soldiers,
factory people, pensioners; and, as he had no
particular theory to disturb his facts, he honestly
set down such results as he met with. All the
infants in the Foundling Hospital at Brussels
for a considerable period were weighed; and the
results were compared with others obtained at
similar establishments in Paris and Moscow.
The average returns show that a citizen of the
world, on the first day of his appearance in
public, weighs about six pounds and a half;
a boy-baby a little more, a girl-baby a little less.
Some very modest babies hardly turn the scale
with two pounds and a half, while other
pretentious youngsters boast of ten or eleven
pounds. When Shylock asked for his "pound
of flesh," he asked for an equivalent to a little
less than one-sixth of a baby. How the tiny ones
grow during childhood, we need not trace here;
but it may be interesting to know that girls and
boys at twelve years of age are nearly equal in
weight; after which limit, males are heavier
than females of the same ages. M. Quetelet
grouped his thousands of people according to
ages, and found that the young men of twenty
averaged a hundred and forty-three pounds each,
while the young women of twenty gave an
average of a hundred and twenty pounds. His
men reached their heaviest bulk at about thirty-
five, when their average weight was a hundred
and fifty-two pounds; but the women slowly
fattened on until fifty, when their average was
one hundred and twenty-nine pounds. Men and
women together, the weight at full growth
averaged almost exactly ten stones, or a hundred
and forty pounds. As M. Quetelet wished to be
accurate, and as he naturally had not many
opportunities of weighing people without their clothes,
he weighed the clothes without the people as well
as with the people; and he came to a conclusion
that the clothing of Belgians of all classes may
be averaged at about one-eighteenth of the total
weight of a man, and one twenty-fourth of the
total weight of a woman. Whether these ratios
would apply to English men and women at the
present day is rather a nice question of tailoring
and dressmaking; but, so far as concerns
M. Quetelet and his Belgians, the figures give
eight or nine pounds weight for a man's dress,
and five or six for a woman's. With these
deductions for dress, the inquiries show that
full-grown men and women are about twenty
times as heavy as they were on the first day of
their existence. Of course averages are here
only meant. The averages were formed from
men ranging from a hundred and eight to two
hundred and twenty pounds, and women from
eighty-eight to two hundred and seven pounds.
M. Quetelet tried to estimate what was the
actual weight of human nature over which
Leopold was king. He found that, taking all ages
and conditions—nobles, clergy, tinkers, tailors,
wives, maidens, boys, girls, and babies, all
included—the average weight was almost exactly
one hundred English pounds avoirdupois for each
human being: a quantity easy to remember, at
any rate. Britons are a trifle more massive than
Belgians; but, setting this minor difference aside,
we find that the whole body of us here, in the
United Kingdom, weigh about three thousand
million pounds—not a very spiritual or
sentimental estimate, certainly, but one that we can
mentally realise by finding that it is just about
equal to the weight of four months' consumption
of coals in the metropolis. As chemists tell us
that we are furnaces, with food for fuel, the
analogy is not so remote, after all. Of course, any
conclusions derived from average results must
depend for their accuracy on the number of
instances which supply the average; and it might
be that M. Quetelet's inferences would need to
be modified a little when applied to the natives
of other countries. All the recorded weighings,
however, agree tolerably in average results.
Several years ago, eighty young collegians were
weighed at Cambridge; they ranged from
eighteen to twenty-three years of age, and their