Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/108

Rh homeward journey very trying, part of the men having to travel as far as 320 kilometers with hardly any water. News received from this expedition points to the extension southward of the volcanic formations discovered by M. Gautier in Mouydir.

Thanks to M. Foureau and to the officers commanding the posts of the extreme south of Algeria, considerable progress has been accomplished by the new method of exploring the Sahara by the employment of "mehara" (singular of " mehari "). This camel can bear, besides his rider and his arms and accoutrements, 30 days' victuals and two skins of water. With this load he can march from 3 to 3¼ miles an hour and amble at a pace of 5 miles. In the raid executed in 1903 by Commandant Laperrine and Professor Gautier 69 miles were traversed in 29 hours.

One has no need for anxiety as to feeding the mehari; the desert flora suffices for its food, and in summer it can endure 5 days without drinking, while when plants are green it can go without water for 18 or 20 days.

By this method of penetration in the Sahara, M. Foureau and these French officers have there accomplished progress as important as that effected by Nansen in his Arctic exploration. By adopting the means of locomotion and of existence of the Polar peoples, the Norwegian explorer gained a memorable victory. In the same way, by borrowing from the inhabitants of the Sahara their mode of life and locomotion, the French have triumphed over the obstacles which the nature of the soil and of the inhabitants had set against the exploration of the great desert of northern Africa.

HE Japanese soldier has been taught how to treat his intestines, and consequently his intestines are now treating him with equal consideration. His plain, rational diet is digested, metabolized and assimilated. It is not an irritating, indigestible, fermenting mess, acting as a local irritant and producing gastritis, duodenitis, enteritis, colitis, hepatitis, and the long list of inflammatory intestinal processes with which we were all so familiar in the hospital wards at Camp Alger, Chattanooga, Tampa, Cuba, Porto Rico, Montauk Point, &c, in 1898. The great hospitals are there, interne, contagious, and infectious departments, their conspicuously empty beds voicing more eloquently than words the most important lesson of the war. A few cases of diseases of the respiratory system are found — colds, bronchitis, and an occasional pneumonia — contracted through exposure in fording rivers, exhaustive marches, and bivouacking on wet ground, a few more of typhoid (I saw only three in Manchuria), occasionally one of dysentery, and a number of cases of beri beri, that former scourge of oriental armies.

But of all the many thousands gathered in these institutions there were but