Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/785

Rh done by Government. Court-houses are built by the State, and usually with a large regardlessness of expense. But they are the work of architects, and are constructed more for external ornament than internal use. They please the eye of the passer with their stateliness, and asphyxiate the judges within. Money is profusely spent, and the building unfit to be used. And so with all places where politicians congregate, and Government provides the edifice. There came a wail from Washington during the last session that our Congressmen were being stifled by the bad ventilation of the House of Representatives. Millions upon millions have been put into the structure, and the whole world is called upon to come and admire its grand proportions and imposing effect, while the legislators within are being suffocated. The best Government in the world strangles its lawgivers with mephitic gases instead of allowing them to breathe pure air. But, before sickness and death can come by poisonous inhalations, there are stages of atmospheric deterioration in which the mind only is affected. The brain, the immediate instrument of thought and feeling, receives and requires the largest proportion of pure arterialized blood of any portion of the body. This is necessary to its functions, so that we cannot think, remember, compare, reason, and judge well, except in pure air, which maintains the mind's organ in its highest vigor and keenest action. Long before judges die and Congressmen take sick they must pass through this stage of cerebral depression, blunting of the sensibilities, and perversion and deadening of the mental operations. How much of the stupidity of legislation and the miscarriage of its judicial application may be due to the muddled brains of lawmakers and judges from breathing the pestilential air of legislative halls and courts of justice, it may be impossible to tell, but the inquiry is suggestive. It is also pertinent to ask, What sort of education can these parties have had, to submit to these conditions, even to the destruction of health and life?

anxiety with which historic works on the relations of science and religion are now sought is a fact of special interest, and we think it a salutary symptom of the state of the public mind. Science has opened the question, and the world is taking hold of it in earnest. "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," by Dr. Draper, while being most vigorously pooh-poohed by those who did not like it, has steadily made its way, through translation, into nearly all the Continental countries, and is at last so loudly called for even in benighted Spain that two editions of it by rival publishers are reported as having appeared in Madrid. What possible or conceivable hope is there that religion and science in that country can ever be brought into genuine amity until there is first an intelligent recognition of what have been their past relations? President White's brief but telling sketch of "The Warfare of Science," though first widely circulated in the pages of this magazine, had to be reprinted, and in a few weeks has reached a third edition in this country, while it has been republished in England, and will undoubtedly be translated, as it deserves to be, into the chief European tongues. The merit of these works, and the secret of their success, are not more due to the ability with which they have been prepared, or the manly and fearless tone with which they discuss questions of the gravest importance, than to their opportune appearance and adaptation to the wants of a rapidly widening audience of thinking people in all countries. War-literature is always popular, but it is beginning to be