Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/645

Rh a faulty English residence, illustrates the author's appreciation of the practical detail of his subject:

A residence in which unhealthiness reaches about its maximum may be said to be one which is built on a damp site, with higher ground behind, pouring down its waters against walls without areas—walls innocent of a damp-proof course to arrest the rising wet—and walls, likely enough, also exposed, by insufficient thickness, to driving rains. It may be in the neighborhood of low-lying fields, undug, unditched, undrained, or with the tiles long since choked up. The rooms throughout are low, with a haphazard ventilation, insufficiently furnished with windows, and with perhaps too many doors. The main staircase is without a lantern-vent, or the wall there is pierced by a window not sufficiently high to empty the gasometer overhead. As for the back-stairs, the basement-smells climb them en route for the dormitories. The chimney-flues are also badly constructed, and a smoky atmosphere is all but constant. Overcrowding lends its quota of evils—as press-beds in every available corner testify. The drain-pipes are injudiciously laid inside instead of outside the basement, with leaky joints, owing to indifferent luting, and with pipes broken where they pass through the walls, owing to continuous settlement. A foul soakage of the soil around the unpuddled pipes speedily follows. The lead-work is also defective, dishonestly executed with thinnest material, badly junctioned to the drains; or, if once properly performed, the maintenance of that state of things is neglected from ignorance or parsimony. The water-pipes, too, are all built in the brick-work, or buried deep in plaster, a burst pipe soon causing the walls to resemble a huge sheet of wet blotting-paper. As for the sinks, they are far too numerous, and made to perform improper services. The scullery-traps have long ago lost their gratings, and are filled up with grease or other refuse. Up-stairs the waste-pipe of the lavatory and of the bath are connected direct with the sewer. There is, moreover, only one cistern for the multitudinous necessities of a family. The closets, supplied from this same cistern, stand directly in the passage, and have only one door; the apparatus is faulty, and the hidden soil-pipe is somewhere imperfect. Ventilation of the drains there was originally none, and none is contemplated; the accumulated gases, therefore, take the water-trap by storm, and invade the atmosphere of the house. Even the flushing of the too flatly laid house-drains is unattended to, or left to the periodical downfall of rain through the rainwater pipes, which only serves to stir up the nuisances, not carry them resistlessly away.

elegant periodical, a credit alike to science and to Chicago, has now reached its third number, which comes filled with interesting and valuable articles. It is published by the State Microscopical Society of Illinois—a significant fact, as indicating an extending taste for nice and critical observation. The use of the microscope combines elegant and refined recreation with serious and solid scientific work, and we are glad to see these evidences of its increasing appreciation. For a long time the microscope was but a plaything, and the share it was to take in the development of knowledge was little suspected. Even so late as 1839, according to Mr. Lewes, Magendie denied that it could be of any use in physiology. But, since then, it may almost be said that it has given us a new physiology, while it has become perfectly indispensable in intelligent medical practice, and is in constant requisition in nearly every department of science. It is important, therefore, that we should have a periodical especially devoted to the interests of the instrument, its results, and the numerous subjects which are dependent upon its application. The Lens promises to supply this need. Its papers are varied and able, and the illustrations excellent. We cordially wish it the success it deserves.

long-expected work, "The Beginnings of Life," is now completed, and will be speedily published in two volumes. Dr. Bastian is the leading "representative of the doctrine" popularly known as spontaneous generation, and this work will contain the results of his extensive experimental investigations concerning it. His treatise, however, goes much further than this, and is, in fact, a broad discussion of philosophical biology—a cyclopædia of facts, theories, processes, and conclusions respecting the origin of the simpler forms of life. He works the subject from the a priori and rational point of view, as well as from that