Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/187

Rh Another great source of the lengthening of life is found in the steady advance in temperance. The ardent advocates of total abstinence may imagine this an unfounded claim, but there is not only a lessened consumption of intoxicants, but public sentiment has experienced a complete revolution since the first commission to inquire into the possibilities of improvement was appointed. The "six-bottle" and even the "one-bottle" man have gone out of fashion, and wise Christian philanthropists have learned that some bright, attractive coffee-room, or some other thing that meets the longing for social cheer, must take the place of "Joe's cozy corner" or the gin-palace. Education is beginning to tell in the same direction, and anon, there will be found interesting and elevating employment for men's idle hours to complete the cure. In England the opening of the museums and galleries and other places of intellectual culture on Sundays has been found to greatly wean men and women from the gin-palace and "public."

The sanitation of schools and the wiser care of infancy and childhood save annually thousands of "innocents." Irf the city of New York a man who has long been on the summer corps of extra doctors for the poor says that the very poor are becoming "educated up" by the distribution of leaflets and oral instruction till they really give more intelligent care to their children than the artisan class who hire their own doctors, and, being thought to know all they need to, are often left in dense ignorance.

Pew reflect on the saving of life through well-lighted streets and a well-organized police. In Queen Elizabeth's time, John Graunt, who studied the records of crime, boasts that not more than one in two thousand was murdered annually, because the guard of the city (London) was taken in turn by the citizens. At that rate the number of murders for the whole of the metropolis would be twenty-five hundred now, while the actual annual average is no more than twelve in the five million people guarded by the London police—a population almost equal to the whole of England and Wales in Elizabeth's time. No wonder that Hobbes wrote at that time of the life of man as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; and, although not all the reasons have been marshaled, it is equally no wonder that the thoughtful are beginning to protest against the literal meaning of "the days of our years are threescore years and ten."

takes notice of a quaint custom, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, known as payment of "wrath silver," which was observed last year at Knightlow Hill, a tumulus between Rugby and Coventry, England. It consists of tribute payable by certain parishes in Warwickshire to the Duke of Buccleugh. The silver has to be deposited at daybreak in a hollow stone by representatives of the parishes, under penalty of the forfeiture of a white bull with a red nose and ears. The representatives afterward dined together at the duke's expense.