Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/734

714 that since the meeting of the British Association in Montreal in 1884 the mineral production of the Dominion had more than doubled. The principal metals of Canada are gold, silver, nickel, copper, lead, and iron; besides these, manganese, chromium, antimony, and zinc occur, with platinum and rarer metals. The gold is at present obtained from the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. In Ontario, discoveries of this metal have been made over an area of about two thousand square miles, in a tract one hundred miles wide and two hundred miles long. As for silver, the Slocan mines and those of Trail Creek and East and West Kootenay appear to be of extraordinary richness. The lecturer dwelt at some length on the importance of the resources of Canada in iron and steel, and mentioned nickel, which greatly affects the quality of steel, as a metal the importance of which it is impossible to overestimate, and chromium as a metal with which the manufacturer of projectiles would probably triumph over the man who put nickel into his steel armor.

The Cruelties of Antivivisectionists.—Dr. Charles Minor Blackford, after reviewing the present position and needs of pathology in an address on that subject before the Medical Society of Virginia, spoke of a danger as confronting it which has passed away from every other science. Prof. Andrew D. White, he said, "has lately given us a history of The Warfare of Science, in which he has told, plainly and simply, the story of the army of martyrs to scientific truth, and his record is one that may well make us blush for humanity. It is true that we no longer have to fear the stake and rack in investigating Nature, but, though life and limb are safe, the same spirit survives in other forms. A number of persons, whom, for the sake of our civilization, we will assume to be well intended, are striving in many ways to oppose freedom of thought as much now as in the fifteenth century. They lay great emphasis on the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill,' but ignore 'Are ye not worth many sparrows?' Assuming a number of facts that they are unable to prove, they endeavor to make those whose lives are devoted to saving life and relieving pain appear the most cruel of wretches. Never having seen the interior of a laboratory, they erect an imaginary one, and coolly assert that the scenes that their own imaginations have conjured up go on in them, and at their meetings vote resolutions condemning physiologists for attempting to save life, and legislatures for forbidding the wearing of our song birds on their hats. In our climate there are not five days in as many years that it is necessary to wear furs for shelter from cold, yet two of the greatest nations of the world have been on the brink of war for some years past, and a harmless and beautiful race of animals have been well-nigh exterminated to supply what is purely an article of vanity and luxury. To supply the 'aigrettes' worn on woman's bonnets, female herons have to be killed at a time when the death of the mother means the death of her brood; and yet when a British Humane Society appealed to the leader of the British fashionable world to give up this senseless and cruel ornament, it met an abrupt refusal. Similarly, the American bison has been exterminated to gratify vanity; the same fate awaits the elephant; and, I will venture to say, the pain endured by geese to supply the 'live-goose feathers,' and by horses in having their tails docked and in wearing the 'kimble-jack'—both thoroughly useless affectations of fashion—is greater than that endured by any animals in a laboratory. In this latter case, not merely do the horses have to endure, without an anæsthetic, cutting through a highly nervous part, but they are rendered defenseless from the attacks of flies and other insects by the loss of Nature's weapon, and are forced to drag heavy vehicles at high speed with the head held in an unnatural position by a rough bit in the tender mouth. We can picture the members of antivivisection societies driving to their meeting with horses so mutilated, removing their sealskin coats and aigretted bonnets, and denouncing attempts to find a cure for diphtheria.

 'Oh, wad some power the giftie gi'e us To see oursel's as ithers see us!'"

Economical Experiences in Canada.—In a study of certain characteristics of the history of economics in Canada, presented to the British Association, Prof. Adam Scott describes this history as having been, up to the beginning of the present century and for