the Statistical Society. Mr. J. T. Danson
read it, who enforced an argument of which
I now condense the leading points:

Nearly all towns have been formed by
the demand for a congregation of labourers.
The labourers forming centres of families,
cause an addition of about four persons,
whose labour is not necessary there, to
each effective workman. As a general rule,
healthy men are wanted for town work;
women, children, and sick men are better in
the country. It is not worth while to
complicate the question of lodgment for town
populations by establishing a demand for air,
water, and sewage from people who are not
wanted in town, and would be better off as
well as happier elsewhere. The question, as
it stands, is an immensely difficult one.
Except to get his food, the labouring man
does not communicate with his family from
morning till the evening of a working day,
and it would be quite easy to secure dinner
as cheaply, or more cheaply, in other
ways. A Sunday in the country would
bring blessings of health, or more than
health, to working men who do not now
enjoy it. For labourers to sleep of
nights in wholesome air, all the week
through, would make the benefit more sure.
The railways might, within a radius of
twenty miles, make cheap and rapid transit
easily available for all. The difficulties in
the way of multiplying good dwellings for
town labourers would be much lessened, if
there were plenty of free country ground to
build upon. Again, there are in the
surrounding country light and healthy occupations,
at which women could work without
hindrance to their domestic duties. Within,
the proposed twenty miles radius, for
example, lies the ring of market-gardens by
which London is surrounded, and upon which
women and children can do piece-work in
large numbers, with profit to the gardener
and to themselves.

Townspeople who do no town work are,
says Mr. Danson, like non-combatants
retained in a military camp. They might easily
be taught to find their own advantage in
removal to suburban villages, properly
constructed, in the neighbourhood of railway
stations. There would be decrease of crime
as well as of disease, especially of juvenile
crime, by the removal of children from the
worst kinds of polluting influence. The
burden of local taxation would be lighter
over the whole country, rather than heavier,
for such a change. Service would be done to
the interests of agriculture, and something
would be done towards a healthier development
of English railways.

I state this view without adopting it
exactly. All that I ask for is the piece of
elbow-room that railways have it in their
power to give London, by showing that they
are at any rate able to do for us four times
as much work as an ordinary omnibus. Let
the way be found to a fair beginning, and a
full development of a system of Omnibus
Trains that will carry townsmen ten miles
instead of three for threepence, twenty miles
instead of five for sixpence, and I am
content to leave to the free action among
themselves, of the citizens of all ranks, the right
use of the space thus won to them.

CHIP

CHARACTER-MURDER

SOME bones have been found, whether of a
rat or cat, beef bones or mutton bones, we
cannot say; but careful inquiry, according to
the declaration of a newspaper report, has
raised a doubt—only a doubt—if they are
human bones at all. Careful inquiry has, at
the same time, settled that they are not the
bones of a particular John Margetts, who
died six-and-twenty years ago, but who was
declared to have been murdered in year
twenty-seven of this century. The careful
inquirer knew probably of some peculiarity
about the bones of Margetts, whereby,
though he might not be sure whether the
particular bones he was examining were
man bones or mutton bones, he could decide
at once that they were not Margetts' bones;
and since, for the credit of the elder gossips
of North Shields, it is necessary to maintain
that Margetts was a murdered man, "an
impenetrable mystery," adds the report,
"once more falls over the old story of thirty-
five years."

As an old story, this bit of mystery found
its way into an article on Disappearances in
the third volume of this journal. The purport
of it is, that the son of a respectable old
woman in North Shields was trying to struggle
into sufficient knowledge of medicine to
go out as ship-surgeon in a Baltic vessel, and
perhaps, in this manner, to earn money enough
to spend a session in Edinburgh. The young
man's name was John Margetts; and he
was kindly received as a surgery pupil by a
benevolent physician of the town, the late
Dr. Greenhow. Dr. Greenhow had been
with a patient all night (Mrs. Gaunt, the
wife of a thriving confectioner), and left her
very early on a winter's morning, in the year
twenty-seven before named, to return home
to bed; but first he stepped clown to his
apprentice's home, in one of the alleys or
chares that lead down from the main-street
to the river, and bade him get up and follow
him to his own house, where some medicine
was to be mixed, and then taken to the lady.
Accordingly, the poor lad came, prepared
the dose, and set off with it some time
between five and six on a winter's morning.
He was never seen again. That, with the
natural additions made to it by local sentiment
was a delightful bit of mystery. A
small vessel bound for Edinburgh had that
same morning sailed out of port; and the