Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/628

610 be feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly, is now rarely beard of. Curious is it to find that some of the diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought of little account, and for the cure of which, therefore, people rely to their cost on quackery instead of medical science.

This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the United States has been coincident with a marked change in the attitude of the American pulpit as regards the theory of disease. In this country, as in others, down to a period within living memory, deaths due to want of sanitary precautions were constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as "results of national sin," or as "inscrutable Providences." That view has mainly passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of the country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading useful ideas as to the prevention of disease; the religious press has been especially faithful in this respect, carrying to every household more just ideas of sanitary precautions and hygienic living.

In summing up the whole subject, we see in this field another of those great triumphs of scientific modes of thought which are gradually doing so much to evolve in the world a religion which shall be more and more worthy of the goodness of God and of the destiny of man.

has brought four specimens of the wild horse (Equuis Prejevalsky) home to St. Petersburg from central Asia. He has found that a part of the oasis of Turfan is below the level of the sea, and believes that it represents the bottom of a former lake of considerable extent.