Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/256

244 of the presence of pain in 46 per cent, of women, it is traced among other things to "work that is either absolutely excessive, or excessive relative to woman's constitution, by being prolonged too much during a single session, or else which is insufficiently relieved by recreation." It is impossible to read this last section of the book without coming to the conclusion that the author in many instances is reasoning against her convictions.

The author does not seek to evade the fact that 46 per cent, of women suffer a greater or less degree of pain during this time, and yet it has not the slightest bearing upon woman's efficiency to work while thus suffering to say, as the author does, that this pain is not directly dependent upon the need of rest. If we recognize in pain the ideal curse of humanity, we may form a notion of what a woman must undergo who, under the lash of necessity or duty, carries her burden of pain to her daily tasks. It matters not whether the pain is evaded, or mitigated or not by rest, it is a panacea instinctively sought. It accords also with the universal experience of medical men that pelvic pain, or hyperæmia, is quieted by rest, and this is as true of menstrual pain as of any other condition. Such a fact as this cannot be reasoned away by arguments drawn from speculative physiology.

But we must recognize in this book a new departure in the literature of the question. It is something new, as well as a grand stride in the right direction, for the advocates of woman's immunity from anything like physical restraints to labor to investigate facts and to couch this investigation in scientific language. The faults of the book are mainly those of hasty preparation, both in the collection of data and the arguments based upon them. We are satisfied that, with a wider range of facts and greater deliberation in handling them, many of the hasty generalizations which we have pointed out would not have occurred. The book shows hard and honest work, and demonstrates the great capacity of Dr. Putnam-Jacobi for scientific investigation.

little tract is designed to show the working-man's wife how she may provide for her household a sufficiency of good, wholesome food at a cost easily within the means of the poorly-paid day-laborer. An edition of 50,000 copies has been published by the author for gratuitous distribution, and it would be an act of humanity to aid in circulating the book among the class who have need of the information it contains. The poorer class of people are, in proportion to their means, far more wasteful than the rich, and the information here conveyed cannot fail to be highly profitable to them.

geographers, and others, are constantly demanding improved values of the geographical coördinates of places on the earth's surface, as the demands of their pursuits become more and more exacting. When the longitude of a slow-sailing vessel was obtained by observations of lunar distances a large uncertainty in the resulting datum was inevitable, and was expected and allowed for. Modern practice in steamers, where every additional hour's run means the expenditure of valuable fuel, etc., and where an uncertainty as to the ship's position is subsequently paid for by the owner in the expenses of the voyage, demands something more than the approximate longitudes of prominent seaports, which before were sufficient.

This want has been long felt, and the establishment of secondary meridians has been attempted in many places and by various nations. In 1866 a committee of the French Bureau des Longitudes was directed to prepare a plan for fixing a certain number of fundamental secondary meridians, separated by convenient distances, all round the world; and, in March, 1867, their report having been submitted to the Minister of Marine, its immediate execution was directed. A commission of eminent French naval officers was organized to superintend the preparation for this work and its performance, and five or six parties of skillful observers were, after several months of preliminary study and practice, dispatched with their instruments to various parts of the world to make observations of moon-culmintaionsculminations [sic] to