Volume 23 — A TOWN OF DWARFS.

A writer in the London "Times" describes the effect of excessive intermarriage on the inhabitants of Protés, a little town in the province of Santander, Spain. Until eighteen or nineteen years ago, the village was quite shut off from the rest of the world. Its inhabitants, from their ever-recurring intermarriages, had become quite a race of dwarfs. On market days the priests might be seen, with long black coats and high black hats, riding in to purchase the simple provision for the week's consumption—men of little intelligence and no learning, sprung from the lowest ranks. About eighteen years ago the Galician laborers, or Gallegos, from the mines of Galicia, swarmed into the town for lodgings, etc., and since their colonization the population has increased in strength, stature, education, intellect, and morality. Their intellects, also, have improved—intellects which had been stunted, dwarfed, and ruined by their frequent intermarriages.