Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/584

570 be the least fatigued, and so the first to awake, or the most exhausted, and therefore the most difficult to arouse. The secret of good sleep is, the physiological conditions of rest being established, so to work and weary the several parts of the organism as to give them a proportionally equal need of rest at the same moment; and, to wake early and feel ready to rise, a fair and equal start of the sleepers should be secured; and the wise self-manager should not allow a drowsy feeling of the consciousness or weary senses, or an exhausted muscular system, to beguile him into the folly of going to sleep again when once he has been aroused. After a very few days of self-discipline, the man who resolves not to doze, that is, not to allow some sleepy part of his body to keep him in bed after his brain has once awakened, will find himself, without knowing why, an early riser.

Reafforesting of Ireland.—At the suggestion of Dr. Lyon, M. P. for Dublin, Mr. D. Howitz, Forest Conservator of Denmark, has made an examination of the resources and the need of Ireland for forest cultivation, and his observations and conclusions have been embodied in a parliamentary report. He has found that "swamps and morasses are created in Ireland from the want of trees to drink up the superfluous moisture. Irish rivers inundate the districts they traverse because there are no forests on the mountain-tops to arrest and retain the autumn and spring rains. In summer there is a dearth of water because the trees are gone which would have served, each, as a reservoir....Irish agriculture, by its system of straight drains, which Mr. Howitz entirely disapproves, has acted as if water were poison instead of nutriment. In the past by felling the mountain-woods, and in the present by planting no successors, it has done worse by tapping the supply at its source. Irish fruitfulness is gradually being drained and washed away into the lakes and seas, and no preparation has been made to replenish it." Yet the island presents the especial conditions for rendering forestry easy and beneficial. Five million of its twenty million acres are waste, and might be planted with a reasonable certainty of profit; and these lands would grow valuable timber, instead of the commoner and cheaper kinds. The list of available trees includes thirty-six conifers, thirty-eight deciduous and hard-wood species, and eight sorts of bushes. Mr. Howitz has drawn up from personal inspection a scheme for planting a hundred thousand acres every year for the next thirty years. By the end of that time a plantation, he estimates, will come to full productive capacity, besides having already given incidental returns from brush-wood and saplings. The cost per acre, at the end of thirty years, will have been, at the highest, £20, or $100; while the lowest annual profits are computed, at present prices, at one pound, or five dollars per acre; and as the demand for timber is all the time rising, and the area of supply narrowing, they are likely to be higher.

The Training of a Medicine-Man.—The medicine-man among the Indians of French Guiana, who is called the piaye, is priest, doctor, wizard, and mountebank, chiefly the last, all in one. He prepares himself for his office by going through a course of special training, full of terrible experiences, to which he submits willingly for the sake of the advantages he expects to gain. The candidate, who is supposed to have had some kind of a call to the office, must obligate himself to submit, without flinching, to all the processes of discipline that are to be imposed upon him. Except for a little instruction in the concoction of poisons, the discipline has no reference to the medical art. For six months he is put upon a diet of manioc, which he must feed himself with his feet, using his hands only to guide his feet to his mouth; then he is allowed dried fish, to be taken in the same way, and tobacco, of which he must swallow the juice. Having survived this for a year, he is "examined" by being held under water till he is almost strangled, and then made immediately to walk over red-hot coals, deliberately. Another year of the former regimen is given him to prepare for his second examination, when he is tied up in a bag full of red ants, previously well shaken to a pitch of savage excitement. He is next treated to a most ingeniously devised application of wasp-stings, and to a trial of snake-bites, against which he is permitted