Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/386

354 reason for existence leads it to try to show results. Hence the unwillingness of the advocates of "scientific temperance" to let well enough alone. From two pages out of three hundred they have come to insist upon sixty pages out of four hundred. But this will not satisfy. Sooner or later the whole must be conquered. With every additional page taken from science for temperance, they have the basis for a show of results.

"The natural result of the dictatorship of unscientific people over a scientific subject is that they require all sorts of the most absurd things. Their success with legislatures has made them arrogant and oppressive in the extreme. These women certainly must be in earnest to be willing to assume to control for the whole country the teaching in the schools of a subject in which they do not profess to be trained; to assume to dictate to those who have made a certain science their life work what they shall and shall not say on this subject; to be willing to see, indeed to put in motion the machinery which brings about, a form of legislation which further developed would turn the public schools into an instrument which the smartest politicians who could capture them might use to further on any true or false reform or visionary scheme."

The only remedy for such meddling lies in allowing that science shall be free to teach its own lessons, and that the public schools shall not be used by advocates of any kind of social or political reform, no matter how meritorious the cause may be in itself.

The whole "scientific temperance" movement is opposed to the movement for good schools through the choice of good teachers. It has been judged thus far mainly by its motives, which are good. It will come to be judged by its results, and these are bad.

In his estimate of the age of Niagara Falls, Mr. J. W. Spencer assumes that the authors of the later computations have failed to take sufficient account of the factors that have caused the rate of recession of the cataract to vary, and of the consequent variation. He has newly examined the channels of the river and the geological evidences they offer, and has incorporated the results in his estimate. He finds that at the nativity of the Niagara River there was no fall. Then the waters sank to the level of Iroquois Beach, and the falls were very much like the modern American cataract in height and volume. This afterward increased in volume and went through a number of changes that are detailed in the author's paper. His computations result in the conclusion that the falls are thirty-one thousand years old, and the river is of thirty-two thousand years' duration. It is further roughly estimated that the lake epoch began fifty or sixty thousand years ago. If the rate of terrestrial deformation continues as it appears to have done, then in about five thousand years, Mr. Spencer thinks, the life of Niagara Falls will cease by the turning of the waters into the Mississippi.