Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/879

Rh by her pones and mimicry the symbols and sacred legends of the ancient literature, the original myths which, having undergone a series of transformations, have gained a foothold in the popular conception and become fairy stories. The myths, the primitive forms of which are fixed by the dancing girls in the Angkhor bas-reliefs, are the same as arc represented in legendary form in the royal festivals, and as may be witnessed by any visitor at the palace of King Norodom I of Cambodia. While a choir of women chant the legends from the ancient sacred poems, other actors silently feign, in postures religiously prescribed by tradition, the emotions they are supposed to feel and the different phases of the drama represented. Thus, they interpret, by the same attitudes as were engraved upon the stone two thousand years ago, the myths and primitive beliefs that were vital in the imagination of the Aryans when they first entered the peninsula.

Effects of Cold on Microbes.—Mr. J. J. Coleman and Professor J. G. McKendrick have been making experiments on the effects of cold upon microphytes. With a mechanical freezer they produced a cold of 80° below zero, and lower, to which they exposed putrescible substances for various lengths of time; then the same substances were exposed to the conditions of temperature, etc., under which putrefaction is developed, and the results were observed. The experiments were made with meats, fresh and canned, wine, milk, beer, ale, meat-juice, neutralized vegetable infusions, putrefying fluids, gelatinous infusions of meat with grape-sugar, etc., in exposure to cold of from 80° to 120° below zero, for from a few hours to a hundred hours or more. The results were in every case substantially the same. The putrefactive process was checked and made slower for a time, but in no case were the micro-organisms so thoroughly destroyed but that putrefaction set in again after a greater or less length of exposure to a temperature favorable to it. The conclusion of the experimenters was that the degree of cold they employed may perhaps be competent to destroy living, developed organisms, but not to kill the germs. A cold-blooded animal—a frog—was frozen solid by a half-hour's exposure to a temperature of from-20° to-30°, but recovered on being thawed out, while after twenty minutes' exposure to-100° it failed to recover. A warm-blooded animal—a rabbit—was not frozen by an hour's exposure to-100°, but its bodily temperature became reduced from 99° to 43°.

Democracy In the High-School.—In a report on city schools, the late Mr. John D. Philbrick accounts for the rapid growth of public sentiment in favor of the high-school, which has not been confined to any one section of the country, by observing that these schools naturally find favor in a democratic community, because they are the most truly democratic of all our institutions. Nothing is more common than to see pupils, representing the extremes in the social scale, sitting side by side in the high-school classes. I have seen the son of the cultured and wealthy merchant and the son of a very poor immigrant going together from the same class in the grammar-school to the same class in the high-school, the former spending his pocket-money to buy the requisite outfit of clothes and books for the latter. I have seen young ladies coming from families of the first rank, not only in respect to culture and wealth, but also in respect to ancestral pretensions, passing the three-years course in the girls' high-school side by side with the daughter of the laborer and the washer-woman. In a suburban town I have seen the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer procuring by subscription the funds to enable a classmate, the worthy son of a poor Irish farmer, to obtain the clothing needful to make it practicable for him to perform the part assigned him on graduating-day. At this same school on graduating day I have heard the salutatory address by the daughter of an English immigrant laborer, who can neither read nor write, and the valedictory by the daughter of the wealthiest capitalist in town, while the most meritorious performance on the occasion was by a sister of the young man referred to. This young man, it may be added, who has been during the five or six years since his graduation most industriously at work on his father's little farm, is an ardent friend of the high-school, and he regards the 'idea that education unfits a man for