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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



huge herds ; and it is more agile and infinite- 

 ly more wary than its prairie cousin. The 

 formation of this race is due solely to the 

 extremely severe process of natural selec- 

 tion that has been going on among the buf- 

 falo-herds for the last sixty or seventy 

 years." Elk were formerly plentiful all over 

 the plains, but they have been driven off 

 the ground nearly as completely as the buf- 

 falo. They are still, however, very com- 

 mon in the dense woods that cover the Rocky 

 Mountains and the other great Western 

 chains ; but they are unfortunately one of 

 the animals seemingly doomed to total de- 

 struction at no distant date. Already their 

 range has shrunk to far less than one half 

 its former size. " Ranged in the order of 

 the difficulty with which they are approached 

 and slain," says Mr. Roosevelt, " plains 

 game stand as follows : big-horn, antelope, 

 white-tail, black-tail, elk, and buffalo. But, 

 as regards the amount of manly sport fur- 

 nished by the chase of each, the white-tail 

 should stand at the bottom of the list, and 

 the elk and black-tail abreast of the ante- 

 lope. Other things being equal, the length 

 of an animal's stay in the land, when the 

 arch foe of all lower forms of animal life 

 has made his appearance therein, depends 

 upon the difficulty with which he is hunted 

 and slain. But other influences have to be 

 taken into account. The big-horn is shy 

 and retiring; very few, compared to the 

 whole number, will be killed ; and yet the 

 others vanish completely. Apparently they 

 will not remain where they are hunted and 

 disturbed. With antelope and white -tail 

 this does not hold ; they will cling to a place 

 far more tenaciously, even if often har- 

 assed. The former, being the more con- 

 spicuous and living in such open ground, is 

 apt to be more persecuted ; while the white- 

 tail, longer than any other animal, keeps 

 its place in the land in spite of the swinish 

 game-butchers. ... All game animals rely 

 upon eyes, ears, and nose to warn them of 

 the approach of danger ; but the amount of 

 reliance placed on each sense varies greatly 

 in different species." 



The Influence of Sewerage and Water- 

 Supply ON THE DEATH-RATE IN ClTIES. 



By Erwin F. Smith. Pp. 84. 

 This paper was read at the Sanitary 

 Convention at Ypsilanti, Michigan, July, 



1885, and is reprinted from a supplement 

 to the " Annual Report of the Michigan State 

 Board of Health for 1885." As the author 

 himself states, nc effort has been made to 

 present anything new in this article, but he 

 has rather sought to place, in a form suit- 

 able and convenient for study and compari- 

 son, facts and data otherwise not readily 

 accessible. It will seem somewhat surpris- 

 ing at first sight that so much of the mate- 

 rial used is from foreign sources ; yet this 

 could not be avoided, as the writer forcibly 

 points out, for, although there is no lack of 

 so-called statistics in our own country, yet 

 reliable and therefore valuable mortuary 

 data are obtainable from but few localities. 

 While we can not, in our space, mention all 

 the questions and matters touched upon in 

 this pamphlet, we would call especial atten- 

 tion to the charts appended to it. An ex- 

 amination of them ought to be sufficient to 

 convince the most skeptical as to the direct 

 relation an improvement in the system of 

 sewerage and the water-supply of a city 

 holds to the decrease in the death-rate of 

 its inhabitants from certain diseases. 



In Chart I, which records the deaths 

 from typhoid fever to each 10,000 inhabit- 

 ants before, during, and since the introduc- 

 tion of sewerage and water-supply, Munich, 

 in Germany, shows for the years 1851 to 

 1859 twenty-one deaths from this disease 

 to each 10,000 inhabitants, while for the 

 period from 1874 to 1884 the rate has 

 fallen to six and three tenths per 10,000. 



Another chart, designed to show the 

 protective influence of sewerage and water- 

 supply in the cholera epidemic of 1865-'66, 

 is divided into two groups. The cities 

 enumerated in Group I were abundantly 

 supplied with good water, and in most cases 

 were also well sewered ; those in Group II 

 were incompletely sewered, or entirely desti- 

 tute of modern sewers, and very dirty ; their 

 water-supply was scant or open to infection. 



In the first group, where we find, among 

 other cities, New York and Brooklyn, the 

 former shows 12 - 8 deaths per each 10,000 

 inhabitants, the latter 16*5. 



Memphis, Tennessee, which is placed in 

 the second group, shows 268 deaths from 

 cholera per each 10,000 of its population. 

 St. Louis has 173*0 as its record ; while Chi- 

 cago, which in this group makes the best 



