Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/851

 said to taste very sweet. A yellow lichen furnishes a coloring matter, and the root of a certain fern (Asplenium or Aspidium) yields a black dye. The leaves of the syringa (Philadelphus lewisii) were formerly used as a soap in washing clothing. The fiber plants are an Asclepias or milkweed, and the common nettle of the country.

The sweat-houses of all the Northwestern Indians are very much alike. They consist of a dome-shaped framework, formed by bending willow sticks over one another, covered with blankets or skins or earth, and a pile of hot stones in the center, or a hole in which hot stones are thrown. The Indian takes his place in the booth, and water is thrown upon the stones. The bathers sit in a suffocating temperature till they have had enough of it, and then rush out and plunge into the water, which they take care to have always near.



ITH Werner Siemens, says a German biographer, died a prince of science, a pathbreaker in the region of electro-technics, a man whose activity extended far beyond his own narrow district, bearing fruit in other branches of human achievement; one of the greatest industrial characters, not of Germany only, but of the whole world; an industrial character, however, to whom gain was never an object in itself, but who rather found in it the incentive to new scientific studies.

was born at Lenthe, Hanover, December 13, 1816, and died in Berlin, December 6, 1893. He came of a family very rich in offspring—while he was the eldest son among ten children. His father. Christian Ferdinand Siemens, was a tenant farmer and forester, who had qualified himself for his profession by studying at the school at Ilfeld and the University of Göttingen. He afterward went to learn practical agriculture with Councilor Deichmann at Poggenhagen, where he married the councilor's daughter, Eleanora Deichmann, preparatory to settling upon his estate at Lenthe.

The English think they have a kind of birthright claim upon Werner Siemens, because, at the time of his birth, the King of England was Elector of Hanover. The connection is not entirely flattering to them, for the elder Siemens fared hardly at the hands of King George. He was arrested and fined for detaining some royal deer which had trespassed upon his premises while awaiting the answer of the gamekeeper to his inquiry as to the disposition he should make of them. To escape such unpleasant incidents the elder Siemens removed, in 1823, to Menzendorf in