Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/627

Rh mounts as one likes a Horse. So useful a beast is estimable, but the most indulgent observation fails to find a ground for affection, Europeans, at all events, who have to do with camels, seem to think it were as easy to lavish one's love on a luggage-van. He is a morose, discontented, grumbling brute, a servant of man, it is true, as is the water that turns a mill-wheel, the fire that boils a kettle, or the steam that stirs the piston of a cylinder. He does not come to a call like other beasts, but has to be fetched and driven from browsing. There are but few words made for his private ear, such as belong to horses, dogs, and oxen. An elephant has a separate word of command for sitting down with front legs, with hind legs, or with all together, and he moves at a word. A camel has but one, and that must be underlined with a tug at his nose-rope ere he will stoop. But he has a large share in that great public property of curses whose loss would enrich the world. Camel trappings are not so gaudy in India as in Egypt or Morocco, where riding animals are bedizened in scarlet and yellow. They are in a different key of color, belonging to a school of pastoral ornament in soberly colored wools, beads, and small white shells, which appears to begin (or end) in the Balkans and stretches eastward through central Asia into India, especially among the Biloch and other camel folk on our northwest frontier. Camel housings may be the beginning of the nomad industry of carpet-weaving. It is, perhaps, not too fanciful to trace on the worsted neck-band the original unit or starting-point of the carpets and "saddle-bags" which have given lessons to English upholsterers.



HE social statistics of our great cities are being put into concrete form by Mr. Harry Tiffany, Chief of the Division of Social Statistics of Cities of the Eleventh Census, under the able direction of Dr. John S. Billings, U. S. Army, expert special agent of the census office. So far the returns on some important leading features comprise about fifty of the principal cities. These facts relate to streets, street-lighting, water-works, sewers, and the police and fire departments. All these, however, are among those features of municipal conditions which are constantly in the minds of men and agitating them as to expenses and the value which they secure in return for taxes paid.

The distribution of population in the fifty cities on which 