Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/737

Rh June are remarkable for the prevalence of white; July, August, and September of yellow; and September and October of purple and blue.

caves of Mount Elgonin, East Africa, extend right round the mountain and occur in the lava as well as in the agglomerate beds. Mr. J. Thomson believes that they are old excavations; but a correspondent of the London Times, who visited them in February, 1893, has come to the conclusion that they are merely vast blow-holes in the mountain, "which is a grand specimen of an extinct volcano, the crater being some eight miles in diameter and from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet in depth." The mountain is fourteen thousand feet high, with a base of about one hundred and fifty miles in circumference.

report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health on the Geographical Distribution of Certain Causes of Death in that State presents the results of an inquiry respecting the relation of paper mills to smallpox mortality. In eleven cities and towns having extremely high ratios of smallpox mortality, six contained one or more paper mills in which rags were used; and a list of twenty-eight cities and towns in which there are paper mills contains only four places in which there were no smallpox deaths during twenty years, and non-fatal cases are known to have occurred in two of these towns. Frequent investigations of the board have shown that smallpox in Massachusetts is very often due to infected rags. In many of these cases it appeared probable that domestic rags collected in the large cities of the United States were the source of infection.

of the silver question is propounded by Mr. Roderick H. Smith, author of several works on business, which he beUeves will be sovereign and permanent. It is the enactment of a law, of which he submits a draft, the essential feature of which is a provision for the issue by the Government of certificates against deposits of silver, which shall be redeemable, on demand, in an equal value of silver to the amount of the deposit. Thus, whatever may be the fluctuations in the value of silver, the certificates can never command more than they are actually worth.

Massachusetts State Board of Health, inquiring into the distribution of cholera infantum, finds the disease apparently promoted by the employment of mothers away from home. It also finds that a high mortality rate from cholera infantum occasionally exists in a comparatively small town where there are one or more densely populated manufacturing villages in which the conditions of living may resemble those of a large city. Upon this point Dr. Haven says: "We may have all, or nearly all, of the most vicious conditions of city life in a single tenement house in some small town of perhaps only a thousand inhabitants; we may have, that is, the heat, the dirt, the overcrowding, the bad drainage, and the artificial feeding which are the concomitants of city life."

by Grassi, Cattani, Tizzoni, Simmonds, and Saivchenk, made under various conditions and in great diversity of forms, are confirmatory of one another, and afford cumulative evidence of the competency of flies to convey cholera germs. Sawchenk even suggests that the bacilli may be able, under suitable conditions, to multiply within the bodies of flies; in which case, besides being dangerous carriers of infection, the flies would be a veritable hotbed for the preservation and further multiplication of cholera bacilli.

illustration of the perseverance shown by roots in seeking food is related in Nature by the Rev. W. H. Oxley, vicar of Peterham. The roots of a wistaria entered the dining-room of Eden House, Ham, by a very small chink in the side of the window near the ceiling. On removing from the walls the paper, which had not been disturbed for many years, the whole of the plaster beneath was found covered with a fine network of roots spreading all round the room. There was no appearance on the paper to give rise to any suggestion of the presence of roots being there. Prof. Dyer remarks that the roots seemed to have behaved more like the mycelium of a fungus than an ordinary axial structure. The room was constantly inhabited, with fires.

Italian Minister of Public Instruction, Signer Martini, has called the attention of the Chamber of Deputies to the evils of overpressure in the public schools, under which the programmes have been enlarged without corresponding enlargement of the cerebral convolutions, and the pupils are "swallowing, much and digesting little." "While the able-bodied artisan," he says, "demands the restriction of his labor to eight hours, we exact from our boys of ten a labor at once more prolonged and more severe." The minister has been quick to learn from the lessons given him, and has already instituted reformatory measures. The tasks to be undertaken after school hours have been minimized, inducements to prolong mental labor beyond the just limits have been diminished, and the overstrain due to excessive competition is discouraged; the number of subjects to be taken up at once is curtailed, the schools have developed a "modern side," and happy results and improvement are already visible.

a recent "long-distance walk" between Berlin and Vienna—some three hundred and sixty miles—the winner among fifteen com