Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/150

140 is extended to classes, nations, and races, who are assumed to be unequal and incapable of attaining to an equal degree of perfection. The author divides men into four classes, in the first of which he places those possessed of creative and initiative faculties above their fellows, while it is to the relative numerical preponderance of this class over the others that he refers the undoubted superiority of one race to another. He thus sees in the dolichocephalic blondes the most famed of all the races of humanity, since, from the dawn of history, all heroes and leaders among men have belonged to this type. In modern times the Anglo-Saxon race has owed its superiority to the preponderance of the dolichocephalic element. France is supposed to be suffering from the diminution of this type in its population, together with the rising preponderance of the brachycephalic type to which the lower classes of the community belong, while a great deterioration of the general personal character through the amalgamation of the two is anticipated as inevitable. Similarly the author sees in the present movement for raising the negro races a source of future danger to the Aryans, who may in time find themselves beaten down by the brute force of teeming masses of inferior brachycephalic peoples.

A Stoker's Life.—The stokers on one of the great ocean steamers work four hours at a stretch, in a temperature ranging from 120° to 160°. The quarters are close, and they must take care that while feeding one furnace their arms are not burned on the one behind them. Ventilation is furnished through a shaft reaching down to the middle of their quarters. Each stoker tends four furnaces, spending perhaps two or three minutes at each, then dashes to the air-pipe to take his turn at cooling off, and waits for another call to his furnaces. When the watch is over, the men go perspiring through long, cold passages to the forecastle, where they turn in for eight hours. One man, twenty-eight years old, who was interviewed by a reporter, had been employed at the furnaces since he was fourteen years old. He weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and was ruddy and seemingly happy. He confessed that the work was terribly hard, but "it came hardest on those who did not follow it regularly. But if we get plenty to eat," he said, "and take care of ourselves, we are all right. Here's a mate of mine, nearly seventy years old, who has been a stoker all his life, and can do as good work as I can. Stokers never have the consumption, and rarely catch cold. Their grog had been knocked off on the English and American lines, because the men got drunk too often, and the grog did them much harm. When I used to take my grog, I'd work just like a lion while the effects lasted. I'd throw in my coal like a giant, and not mind the heat a bit; but when it worked off, as it did in a very few minutes, I was that weak that a child could upset me. Take a man dead drunk before the fires, and the heat would sober him off in half an hour, or give him a stroke of apoplexy."

Disparity in Marriage.—The "Westminster Review" shows that the widows greatly exceed the widowers in number, the proportion in England being as 1,410,684 to 589,644—a proportion which is not very greatly varied from through all the marriageable ages. The difference being hardly accounted for by the superior longevity of women, or the greater exposure to danger incurred by men, the "Review" finds a more efficient cause in marital disparity. Women prefer husbands who have made their fortunes and can give them ease and display, to young men who have their fortunes to make, with privations that must be shared. Thus taking companions considerably older than themselves, they naturally outlive them. It might be a more philosophical proceeding for the woman to marry a man younger than herself, that she may have his society through life, and a support when she will most need him. The results of this course to the cause of purity and to the health of the human race are to be deplored. Disparate unions have been shown to be fertile sources of the failure of marriage. A young woman marrying a man of like age is the right person in the right place. On the contrary, in marrying a man at the end of his manhood, she often drags him down. "Gross disparity was forbidden by Jewish lawgivers, and also by the most