Trends

A Centenary. Last week Boston celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of George T. Angell, founder and first President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Although Deuteronomy 22 :16 contains humane laws for animals, and Deuteronomy 25:4 says: " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain," Massachusetts, in 1868, was treating its dumb animals in a careless or outrageous manner. Mr. Angell, busy lawyer, founded the

Society, and distributed leaflets. He worked with school children especially, and in 50 years completely changed public sentiment in regard to animals.

Christian Science. The religion of Mary Baker Eddy has spread to such distant points as Tientsin, Riga, Bulawayo. At the annual meeting of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, the clerk's report showed a gain of 79 societies, and 16 churches. There are now 2,061 branches of the " mother church." Christian Scientists publish no total membership, but it is known that their rate of gain is not as rapid as it was ten years ago.

Old Fashioned Piety. Governor McLeod, of South Carolina, issued a proclamation calling for a day of prayer for deliverance from the boll weevil, which threatens to destroy the state's cotton crop. While the prayers rise to heaven, airplanes are also ascending, and spraying the fields with hydrocyanic gas and calcium arsenate.

Timber as Well as Souls. Last year the wagons of the Salvation Army collected 55,000 tons of waste paper from the various homes of the nation. This small item, buried in the report of the Social Service Department of the S. A., so inspired Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, that he turned aside from pressing legislative matters to bring the report to the attention of the State Forestry Department, writing an enthusiastic letter to its head, and pointing out that since six tons of paper came from an acre of trees, the Salvation Army had salvaged 9,000 acres of timber. The work of collecting, sorting, and baling the paper was done by the "down but not outers." For the Goddess. The third chapter of II Kings gives an account of human sacrifice to appease an angry god. Last week six members of a tribe in southern Rhodesia were convicted of murder. They had burned to death one Manduza in order to appease the rain goddess whom they thought he had violated. No rain had fallen for weeks, and it was held by them that he had caused the drought by offering her violence. His father, the chief of the tribe, consented to his son's death. When the case was tried in the government courts the tribesmen produced the rain goddess incarnated in a beautiful girl. She did not lower her dignity by speaking to mortals, and her henchmen were convicted.