Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/730

714 matter be avoided and destroyed, and provided care is taken to save the actual meat substance from contamination by such matter, a great deal of meat from animals affected by tuberculosis may be eaten without risk to the consumer. Ordinary processes of cooking applied to meat which has got contaminated on its surface are probably sufficient to destroy the harmful quality. They would not avail to render wholesome any piece of meat that contained tuberculous matter in its deeper parts. The boiling of milk, even for a moment, would probably be sufficient to make it safe.

Similarities in Culture.—Prof. O. T. Mason closes a somewhat critical discussion of similarities in culture on which, he suggests, more is sometimes built than can stand—with the conclusion that such similarities may arise through a common humanity, a common stress, common environment, and common attributes of Nature; through acculturation, or contact, commerce, borrowing, appropriating, between peoples in all degrees of kinship; and through common kinship, race, or nationality. Generic similitudes arise by the first cause; special and adventitious similarities by the second cause; and the more profound, co-ordinated, real, and numerous similarities by the third cause. Similarities are partly natural, such as sounds of animals, forms of pebbles, qualities of stone, clay, and the like, but most of them are fundamentally ideal. Where the same idea exists in two areas, a simple one may have come to men independently. One containing two or more elements in the same relation and order is less likely to have so arisen, while a highly organized idea could not often have come to two men far removed from one another. Furthermore, a complex idea is never the progeny of a single mind, and that embarrasses the question further. The generic and adventitious similarities are most striking and most frequently called to notice. The error is in taking them for profound and real similarities. Those similarities that are imbedded in the life of peoples and logically co-ordinated with the annual circle of activities are of the family and stock, and beyond any reasonable doubt proclaim the people to be one. "Furthermore, they exist for the trained and patient eye and hand; they elude the gaze of the superficial observer. The identification of them is the reward of long years of patient research, and the finder is the discoverer of a pearl of great price."

Electric Cooking Vessels.—The first attempt in practice to devise vessels for cooking by electricity was made about four years ago by a Mr. Carpenter, an American, who developed Lane Fox's idea of surrounding the vessel by a coil of insulated wire through which a current should be passed. He attached the resistant wires to the surface of cast-iron plates by an enameling process. Some defects appeared in his method, among which was the liability of the enamel to crack, whereby the wire was exposed to the oxidizing action of the air. These difficulties have been overcome by the English manufacturers Crompton & Co., who have found a safer enamel and substituted a nickel-steel wire as being better adapted to endure the action to which it is exposed than the wire that was used before. By specially adapted methods they are able to apply the wire in somewhat complicated patterns to the surface of any metal plate, and to insulate it therefrom in a very thorough and permanent manner. They exhibit, constructed on this plan, a simple electric heater—a circular plate mounted on short legs, to the under side of which wire is applied and fixed by the enamel, while the upper side is ground flat and polished—a frying pan, saucepan, kettle, griller, hot iron, and radiator. The radiators have been found convenient, safe, and economical for heating theaters and efficient in preventing the deposition of frost on shop windows.

Formation of Stalactites.—Describing the deposition of carbonate of lime in stalactites and stalagmites, Mr. George P. Merrill, of the United States National Museum, says that water filtering through a rock roof, by virtue of the carbonic acid it contains, is enabled to dissolve a small amount of the lime carbonate, which is again deposited when the excess of carbonic acid escapes either through relief from pressure or through the evaporation of the water. Conditions favorable to either process are furnished by the water filtering through the