Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/434

422, has also published some works on the inhabitants of the Lake of Constance.

Family-Schools of Housekeeping—A writer in the "Pall Mall Gazette" who has herself been trained in that way proposes, as a means of putting an end to the troubles about poor servants and bad housekeeping, that the German plan be adopted of sending every young girl after she has finished her school education, and before she is "out," to learn housekeeping. This every girl in Germany docs, be she the daughter of nobleman, officer, or small official. She goes direct from school into a family corresponding with her station in life. Those who are rich go where they are paid highly, and are in "good family," so that they are enabled to live well and have good cooking and great variety. No one is taken into one of these establishments for less than a year, so that every month a new branch is learned—one month the preserving of fruit in season, the next laying-in of apples and vegetables for winter use, preserving of eggs and butter, etc. These girls are taught everything, from washing up dishes, sweeping and polishing the floors, clear-starching and ironing, dusting and cleaning ornaments, cooking, laying the table, waiting, polishing the silver and glass up, to decorating the table with flowers and fruit. Great is the ambition of the pupil to hear that her taste and management arc the best. Combined with these duties are those of keeping the household linen in repair and learning plain sewing. Thus the young girl gets experience in household affairs. Though the pupils have to learn everything, servants are kept in these establishments, and in their turn are taught by the advanced pupils, who have learned from the mother of the family. This ac-' counts for the excellent housekeeping in Germany, where comfort is combined with economy and the pleasure of having everything precise and clean. The labors of the day are over at midday, that being the dinner-time, when everybody is at liberty for study, needlework, or amusement till time for preparing for supper. There are many families in England who can not afford to keep servants enough to do well all that has to be done. In these families they have to train servants, not being able to afford to keep trained ones. Why not, in these cases, train young ladies (who would also be companions to the daughters)? They might pay something for the instruction, and so put something into the teachers' pocket, while they would also work for her, and at the same time reap information, which they could again impart, and so train good servants, who are at present so hard to get. Mistresses are unable to teach, never having been taught themselves. Thus they are dependent on servants; for when they find fault they are unable, either in cooking or other matters, to point out the mistake or show the correct way. Servants, knowing this fact, arc independent and rule the house, and the "mistresses" must submit. The German system of living with a family and learning by experience how to manage a house is far better than either cooking-schools or lectures on the subject, as a greater variety of things are learned, and they are done in a more refined and economical way.

"Rages" in Surgery.—A part of the Presidential address of M. Verneuil at the recent meeting of the French Association consisted in a spirited and somewhat sarcastic protest against the prevalence of fashions, or "rages," as they are colloquially termed, in surgery. When he began his career, tenotomy was the rage, and tendons, ligaments, and muscles were divided subcutaneously in all parts of the body. A little later "resecomania" flourished, especially in Germany and England, so that some surgeons reckoned their resections by the hundred. Nowadays, when a specialist introduces an operation all specialists follow suit, but with a variation in the shape of the new instrument, so that, "if a museum of operative medicine were founded, immense cases would be necessary to exhibit all the lithotomes, urethrotomes, hysterotomes, and other 'tomes,' comprising small unnamed instruments, intended, I believe, to divide strictures of the nasal duct—strictures which, be it said without bitterness, hardly ever exist, or are in places where they have no need of being divided when they do exist." Gynæcology and ophthalmology compete for honors in this department, and the palm must be given to the former, for, apart from cauterizations, etc., of the cervix, it has