Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/236

222 as the price of disinfecting a room of a hundred cubic metres. The burner costs ten dollars, but it will last for a very long time. This process is evidently practicable and convenient. It does not tarnish metallic objects, and furnishes a continuous, slow, and regular disengagement of the disinfecting gas. Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature.



N the month of February last a report was laid before the Parliament of Canada detailing the results of an expedition dispatched by the Government of that country particularly for the purpose of inquiring into the navigability of Hudson Strait and Bay, and, at the same time, of gathering information concerning the resources of that region, and its availability as a field for settled habitation. This report represents the first properly organized attempt that has ever been made to pierce the secrets of Hudson Bay for the public benefit.

It is at first blush not easy to understand why this mighty expanse of water, occupying the peculiarly important position that it does, should remain for so many generations comparatively unexplored, and wholly unutilized, except as a hunting-ground for a few New Bedford whalers, or a medium of easy communication between some half-dozen scattered factories of the Hudson Bay Company. Although called a bay, it is really an inland sea, 1,000 miles in length by 600 in width, having thus an area of about 500,000 square miles, or quite half that of the Mediterranean. It drains an expanse of country spreading out more than 2,000 miles from east to west, and 1,500 from north to south, or an area of 3,000,000 square miles. Into its majestic waters pour feeders which take their rise in the Rocky Mountains on the west and in Labrador on the east, while southward it stretches out its river-roots away below the 49th parallel until they tap the same lake-source which sends a stream into the Gulf of Mexico. Despite its distance northward, its blue waves are never bound by icy fetters, and its broad gateway to the Atlantic is certainly navigable four months out of the year, and possibly all the year round to properly equipped steamships. Its depths abound in finny wealth, from the mammoth whale to the tiny caplin. Its shores are serrated by numerous streams, some navigable for long distances inland, and all stocked with the finest of fresh-water fish, and clothed as to their banks with valuable timber ready for the lumberman's axe. Its islands are rich in mineral ore of many kinds. The country whose margin its tides lave is well adapted for tillage and pasturage, while all around the region swarms with animals and birds