With this April number THE CALEDONIAN enters on its third year of usefulness. We feel grateful to our subscribers, advertisers and friends for their kind interest and support. We are anticipating great things for the magazine this current year, and expect to make THE CALEDONIAN one of the most attractive and powerful magazines in this country. The following are few of the many congratulations that we have received:

BROOKLYN, N. Y., March 17, 1903.
DONALD MACDOUGALL, B.D.,

Editor of THE CALEDONIAN:

Dear Mr. MacDougall-I heartily congratulate you on the great and wellmerited success of your most excellent magazine, now beginning its third year. From the first to the last page THE

CALEDONIAN throbs with interest. The articles are terse and edifying and reach the high-water mark of literary achievement. It may be truly said that THE CALEDONIAN is an educator. Its general literary excellence and the fact that it has been on a paying basis from the start are a high tribute to the combined literary and business capacity of its founder and editor.

Very sincerely yours,

ALEXANDER COOPER,
Editor Suburban Herald.

Editor of THE CALEDONIAN:

Dear Sir-Permit me a word of congratulation on the attainment of THE CALEDONIAN to the third anniversary of its existence.

There is a large place for it among the sons and daughters of Scotland throughout America and Canada. Let its pages bristle with light on the higher things pertaining to Scottish-American interests, with Excelsior as its motto, and its success is assured.

May it have many years of usefulness.
Most sincerely yours,

JAMES TODD, D.D. 181 Bennington street, Quincy, Mass., March 27, 1903.

489 FIFTH AVENUE,

NEW YORK, March 21, 1903. REV. D. MACDOUGALL, B.D., Editor of THE CALEDONIAN:

Dear Sir It may not be unfitting in view of the approaching anniversary of the third year of THE CALEDONIAN'S life and history that a word of congratulation be tendered. you, for I am reminded that THE CALEDONIAN is your own creation and has been fed, so to speak, by your own hand.

Few magazines have attained in so brief an existence such popularity and power. THE CALEDONIAN holds not only a warm place in the affections of its readers but has earned for itself an enviable position in the great family of magazines. In my own home it is an increasingly welcome visitor and is eagerly looked for. Some of its "issues" have to me been worth the whole year's subscription.

While distinctively Scottish in its general features the catholicity of its spirit. commends it to all.

It is lofty in sentiment and of high

versary of your noble attempt in the realm of such high-class literary catering to your countrymen, in the Western Hemisphere, as well also as to the many thousands of American readers of your able magazine.

I know of few instances in the literary world where such unexampled achievements have been accomplished, single handed, as in the case of your noble and inspiring CALEDONIAN magazine. I wish you more than a corresponding success in the future, to that of the past, and if so, I am satisfied you will have little cause for regrets.

Believe me always very sincerely yours, W. B. SIMPSON. Deputy Royal Chief, State of New York.

In consequence of the increase of our business we respectfully notify our readers that the editorial office will remove to Room 83 Bible House, this week.

We hope to receive additional copies of Skene's "Highlands" at an early date, and shall forward them to the persons entitled to receive them.

The oldest doctor in the world is Jean David, who has this month celebrated the 102d anniversary of his birth at Montpellier. For fifty years he practiced at Grabels as a country doctor, visiting his patients daily on horseback. In his youth he witnessed the march of Wellington and the Peninsular army through Southern France after the battle of Toulouse. Asked the other day to give his recipe for longevity, Dr. David replied: "Sobriety in all respects. The human body is a wonderful machine whose organs should never be overtaxed. For my part I continue living much as I have always lived. I am only worried by onething-the idleness to which failing eyesight has now condemned me.”

FLIGHTS OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS.

Among the most interesting incidental effects of the glacial period is that of its influence in distributing plants and animals over the lower latitude. Before the beginning of the ice age, according to Professor Gray, a temperate climate, corresponding to that of latitude 35 degrees on the Atlantic Coast, extended far up toward the North Pole, permitting Greenland and Spitzbergen to be covered with trees and plants similar in most respects to those found at the present time in Virginia and North Carolina. Here in close proximity to the North Pole were then resting in harmony and contentment the ancestors of nearly all the plants and animals which are now found in the north temperate zone, and here they would have continued to stay but for the cold breath of the approaching ice age, which drove them from their homes, and compelled them to emigrate to more hospitable latitudes.

In the warm period preceding the glacial epoch, when the vegetation of the temperate zone flourished about the North Pole, there was land connected between the continents, permitting the larger species of the old world to migrate to North America.

The refrigeration of the climate on the approach of the glacial period and the advance of the ice from the North cut off retreat to the old world species and gradually hemmed them in over the southern portion of the continent, where all forms of life were compelled to re

adjust themselves to new conditions. With the withdrawal of the ice to the North, the struggle for existence of these animals began anew, and the mammoth and some others were not able to cope with the changes. From the abundance of remains of these animals found in the peat bogs of kettle holes and in the glacial ternaces of gravel and loess, it is evident that they followed closely upon the retreating ice front, and some of them continued the retreat to the arctic circle, where they still live and flourish, while others like the elephant and mastodon, perished. It may be that man himself participated in this struggle with the new conditions introduced by the glacial period on this continent, and that in company with the mammoth, walrus and other arctic species he followed up the retreating ice both upon the Atlantic Coast and in the Mississippi Valley. Whether like some of his companions, he was unsuccessful in the contest is not certain, though there is much to be said in favor of the theory that the Eskimos of the North are the lineal descendants of the preglacial men whose implements are found in New Jersey, Ohio and Minnesota.

Dr. Wright devotes the last two chapters of his book "To Man and the Glacial Period." He calls attention to the large number of implements found in various parts of the United States. These are of human origin. Close inspection. and comparison with natural fragments. has made this fact plain. Various illus

trations and figures of implements are presented from other countries alongside of those collected in the United States show that they really belong to the glacial period. Prof. Henry W. Haynes, of Boston, who is an expert in this line, confirms the author's opinion in a lengthy letter. The implements exhibited in the book are those found at Trenton, N. J., by Dr. Abbott and others, as well as figures of those found in other places, in Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota. Reference is made to the discoveries both of human implements and human remains in the gold bear gravel deposits in California, produced by Professor Whitney of Harvert University and others.

The sharpness of the transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic type of implements would seem to indicate an absolute distinction between the two succeeding races. But whether the first became extinct from natural causes, and the other simply came in later as colonist, or whether the later as conqueror exterminated the first, may always remain a doubtful question.

The book is a library on the whole glacial period. No one can read it without being impressed with the vast store of information it contains upon a subject which was but very little known fifteen years ago. It indicates that the author is not merely acquainted with the extensive literature on the subject, but that he is a master of it. The book is by no means the product of what he had learned in his closet, but the result of many years of hard toil among the glaciers. When he has reason to differ with other investigators he does it courteously and frankly as one who has acquired his idea from practical experience. The limits and permanent characteristics

of the glacial area on this continent are known to him by actual observation. The glacial age of North America is no longer a theory but a well-defined and established fact. He has come to this conclusion after great research, painstaking and persistent effort, though he designates with great cogency that man is connected with the closing centuries of the glacial period in the United States; yet he does not assume to have achieved the exact age of man nor of the glacial epoch. The aim of the book is to give zest to study in this line. "American scholars," he says, "who are ambitious to carry on on archeological investigations, need no longer go to the valley of the Euphrates or the Nile, or to the languages of Central Asia, to find the oldest riches of man in the world, or the surest means of determining the greatest of his antiquity. A boundless, comparatively unworked, most promising and most inviting field lies before the American investigator in the glacial problems of his own country. Nowhere else in the world did the ice of the glacial period deploy out upon so wide a margin of dry land and leave so inviting and so easy a field of study."

AUSTRALIAN LABOR POLITICS.

As the result of a conference of the Political Labor Leagues in New South Wales, the following has been adopted as the fighting platform to which every Labor candidate must pledge himself in the next general election: (1) Amending legislation re Taff Vale decision; (2) free education; (3) abolition of the Legislative Council (or Upper House); (4) workmen's compensation; (5) cessation of further sale of the Crown lands; (6) local government; (7) State bank.