Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/300

286 pupils in such a way as to develop or aggravate in any of them nervous irritation? Does or does not the no-recess plan affect the pelvic organs? Does it or does it not affect the eye-sight? Does it or does it not affect the nasal passages and lungs? How do the physical exercises substituted by the no-recess plan for those of the recess affect relatively the rapidity of the pulse of the pupils, when it is compared to the rapidity developed in the exercises of the out-door recess? Answers may be sent to J. H. Hoose, State Normal School, Cortland, N. Y.

Pacific Coast Panthers.—A correspondent, "Forked Deer," in "Forest and Stream," communicates some notes on the habits of the panther as he has observed them in the Pacific coast region. He expresses surprise that the settlers should have given this animal a different name—California or mountain lion—from the Eastern animal, for the "two panthers are so nearly alike that no one would dream, upon comparing them, of regarding them as distinct species." Yet "the panther of the West coast never indulges, for his own entertainment, in those fierce, cat-like screams with which his Eastern brother occasionally makes night hideous." The correspondent has a growing skepticism in regard to panthers ever willingly attacking a man. "I have known them," he says, "on several occasions to follow persons a short distance, and I have seen wolves do the same thing, especially when I have been packing in freshly-killed meat, but I do not believe that in either case they meditated an attack. In one instance, in the Cascades, near the Hood, I knew a panther to jump at a man as he lay at night in his blankets, but as soon as the man partly arose and shouted for assistance the animal bounded into the brush and disappeared. In talking it over, we all came to the conclusion that the panther had seen the man move under his blankets, and had mistaken him for some less formidable antagonist, and that when the deception was revealed to him he threw up the job at once. . . . That the panther will run from the smallest yelping cur that can be induced to follow his trail is true, but I am satisfied that instinct. . . warns them of the hunter behind the dog, and that it is the latter only which they fear. Panthers ascend the immense trees near the mouth of the Columbia, which are frequently three hundred feet high, and sixty, eighty, or even a hundred feet to the first limb, precisely as a cat would climb them, and when wounded will sometimes go to the very top. Although they may in some places spend the day lying upon the limb of a tree, they are believed to prefer rocky ledges and caverns, where they are accessible, for that purpose."

Cremation of Household and City Refuse.—The ultimate of sanitation, Mr. J. M. Keating, of Memphis, Term., argued in his address before the American Public Health Association, last fall, must be by fire. In support of his thesis, he proved by the citation of dozens of instances in the condition of European and American cities, towns, rivers, water-sheets, public institutions, and private houses, that when the people do not complain of polluted water, as they have to do in most cities, they do of sewer-gas; that when resting seemingly secure in an approximately good system of sewerage, they have to complain of the means for and methods of sewage disposal; that by the London method, so exhaustively expensive, the Thames is still nothing better than a wide-open sewer; that the Paris method is only partial, and too expensive, and altogether impossible for large cities; that by the New York method the docks are filled with excreta, and the entrance to the harbor is threatened by bars formed of the street and house wastes, carried out to sea at great expense by barges; that rivers are being destroyed by sewage which kills the fish and make what was once a source of health a permanent nuisance; that as privies and cess-pools are condemned because they saturate the soil, sewers are to be condemned, in some instances, for the same reason, and because they throw off and fill dwellings with sewer-gas, and docks and harbors and rivers with death-dealing sewage; and that all present plans of sewage disposal are defective because they are not final, because they merely contemplate the removal and not the destruction of what is conceded to be the prime factor in promoting and