POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



861 



nipulated by a child. The louvre window 

 ventilator, such as is common in churches, 

 will be found very valuable for the admission 

 of a constant but comparatively small supply 

 of air. Relatively low rooms, with big, mul- 

 lioned windows going to within a few inches 

 of the ceiling, are far more wholesome than 

 lofty rooms in which the tops of the walls 

 are inaccessible to the housemaid, and the 

 window sashes are too weighty for her to 

 move them without difficulty. For whole- 

 someness and comfort the author believes a 

 height of ten feet is sufficient for any do- 

 mestic living room and nine feet for a bed- 

 room. Provided the windows go to the top 

 and can be easily opened, it is very doubtful 

 if there is any object, from the purely sani- 

 tary point of view, in having rooms more than 

 nine feet high. Facility for cleaning should 

 be ever in the mind of both builder and fur- 

 nisher. The modern boudoir, hung with dabs 

 of mediaeval rags and stuffed with furniture 

 and knickknacks, is often not very cleanly, and 

 when the daylight is excluded, lest fading 

 should take place, and the sun's rays never 

 have a chance of disinfecting the dust on 

 and behind the curios, it can not be very 

 wholesome. 



Tepee and Other Butte*. The term butte 

 is ordinarily applied to steep-sided hills with 

 narrow summits. More rarely it has been 

 employed to designate mountains, but this is 

 probably obsolescent. The tepee buttes de- 

 scribed by Messrs. G. K. Gilbert and F. P. 

 Gulliver in their paper on that subject are 

 so called on account of their resemblance to 

 the lodges, or tepees, of the Sioux Indians. 

 They are constituted around limestone masses 

 in the Pierre shales of Colorado, higher than 

 wide, and in all dimensions of a size to be 

 measured by feet or yards, which, resisting 

 erosion much better than the shales, stand 

 above the general surface. Their fallen frag- 

 ments protect sloping pedestals of shale, and 

 their positions are marked in the landscape 

 by conical knolls. These limestone masses 

 may be called tepee cores and their material 

 tspee rock. They are found scattered irreg- 

 ularly over a considerable district within the 

 Pierre group, in places so thickly set that 

 hundreds may be seen from one point, while 

 elsewhere they are solitary or in groups of 

 two or three. The tepee rock is of coarse 



texture, breaking with rough fracture, of 

 light, warm gray color, and full of fossil ma- 

 rine shells {Lucina), imbedded in a matrix 

 composed of fragments of shell, water-worn 

 grains of calcite, foraminfera, and clay. Al- 

 lied phenomena are found in Canada, of 

 " great spongy and cavernous masses," form- 

 ing islets which the Indians call wigwams 

 and the caverns doors. Other forms of butte 

 mentioned by the authors are the butte mark- 

 ing the site of a volcanic neck, which differs 

 from the tepee butte- in the nature of the 

 core ; the dike, or elongated butte, having a 

 vertical plate rather than a cylinder for a 

 core ; the cylinder butte, which does not owe 

 its form to a hard core, though it may have 

 one, and when freshly formed has a crater 

 at the top ; the spring butte, formed by 

 deposition from the water of geysers or other 

 springs; and the mesa butte, which is the 

 remnant of a tabular outlier, and is carved, 

 like the tepee butte, from a greater mass, 

 but has a hard cap instead of a hard core, 

 and hence a flat-topped instead of a conical 

 form. 



Scientific Work of the Franklin Insti- 

 tute. A historical sketch of the Franklin 

 Institute, Philadelphia, compiled by Mr. 

 Wahl, the secretary, contains a full and only 

 just account of the work it has done during 

 the seventy years of its existence for the ad- 

 vancement of science and the useful arts. 

 Among the most prominent of the works in 

 which it has been engaged, the first of gen- 

 eral public importance was the investigation 

 of the various forms of water wheels for giv- 

 ing economical value to water power. Fol- 

 lowing this, and in the same line of practical 

 usefulness, was an investigation of the cause 

 of the explosion of steam boilers. Closely 

 connected with these experiments was an in- 

 quiry into the strength of materials used in 

 construction. These investigations, the re- 

 sults of which were published in the Journal 

 of the Institute, formed a contribution of 

 great value to manufacturers of steam ma- 

 chinery, architects, and builders. At the in- 

 stance of the Government, the Institute made 

 an investigation and report on the suitability 

 of various building stones, with special refer- 

 ence to the construction of the Delaware 

 Breakwater. At the request of the Legisla- 

 ture of Pennsylvania it examined and report- 



