Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/147

Rh order to accomplish this result, the State Board of Health has published leaflets relating to the modes of spreading and the best methods for the restriction and prevention of such diseases. These leaflets have been printed by tens of thousands, and whenever a dangerous disease is reported to the central office several copies of the leaflet relating to the disease in question are usually sent to the local health officer. He is requested to place one of these instructive publications with the family where the disease exists, and a copy with each neighbor of the infected premises. The instruction comes at a time when people are interested to know about the disease in question, and in this way their general co-operation is sought and secured. Citizens are thus educated and become familiar with their duties in the premises, are taught wherein the dangers lie and how to avoid them, and are prompted by the strongest considerations to do their part in the matter.

Death of Prof. Oliver Marcy.—Dr. Oliver Marcy, professor of natural science in Northwestern University, who died February 19th, in the eightieth year of his age, was a native of Coleraine, Massachusetts; was graduated from Wesleyan University in 1846, became teacher of mathematics in Wilbraham Academy, Massachusetts, and later professor of geology, etc., in that institution. In 1862 he was appointed professor of geology in Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, but taught in addition, at times, other branches of science and even some branches in other lines. He was twice acting president of the university. In conjunction with Prof. Alexander Winchell, he prepared a monograph on Fossils from the Niagara Limestone of Chicago, which was read to the Boston Society of Natural History. In 1866 he was naturalist to a Government expedition to the Bitter Root Mountains in Idaho and Montana, in which he collected scientific material, and of which he published an account in 1867. He wrote papers concerning the geology of the shore of Lake Michigan and of the region about Chicago; brought two fossil trees found in the university grounds to scientific notice; and contributed considerably to geological publications. He was curator to the natural history collection of his university for nearly thirty years. Two fossil species and a mountain in Montana have been named after him.

Which is the Fittest to Survive?—Prof. A. W. Rücker spoke in his opening address at the recent meeting of the International Magnetic Conference in Bristol, England, of what seems to be a law of Nature, that the products of an organism are fatal to itself; in accordance with which, he said, pure science is threatened by the very success of its practical applications. The smoke of our cities blots the stars from the vision of the astronomer, and now the science of terrestrial magnetism is threatened by the artificial earth currents of the electric railway. Prof. W. E. Ayrton, in his welcoming address, took another view of the subject and answered the reference the electrical engineers make to the principle of the survival of the fittest when they are told of the ruin their wires are bringing upon magnetic observatories—"So much the worse for the observatories"—"Can the system of electric traction that has already destroyed the two most important magnetic observatories in the United States and British North America be the best and fittest to survive? Again, do we take such care and spend such vast sums in tending the weak and nursing the sick because we are convinced that they are the fittest to survive? May it not be perhaps because we have an inherent doubt about the justice of the survival of the strongest, or perhaps because even the strongest of us feels compelled modestly to confess his inability to pick out the fittest, that modern civilization encourages, not the destruction but the preservation of what has obvious weakness, on the chance that it may have unseen strength? When the electrical engineer feels himself full of pride at the greatness, the importance, and the power of his industry, and when he is inclined to think slightingly of the deflection of a little magnet compared with the whirl of his one-thousand-horse-power dynamo, let him go and visit a certain dark storeroom near the entrance hall of the Royal Institution, and while he looks