350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



horror from treading on a black beetle, but is only too satisfied to hear 

 that the cook has exterminated the " vermin " by poison or boiling 

 water. But lately an excellent example of a personal sensitiveness 

 being mistaken for compassion has been witnessed in the case of the 

 sale of the elephant. If the word of the Council of the Zoological 

 Society can be taken as true, it was believed that " Jumbo " would be 

 far happier traveling among his kin than leading a life of solitude in 

 London. Yet, in spite of this statement, all the kind-hearted people 

 have been sending their subscriptions to enable the society to forego 

 its bargain, since they and their children can not bear to part with their 

 favorite. It is like the frequent example of a mother preventing her 

 son taking the voyage prescribed for the benefit of his health because 

 her feelings can not allow her to part with him. 



After eliminating all that is irrelevant and false, the question be- 

 tween experimenters and anti-vivisectionists appears to be a simple one. 

 The latter declare that experiments are attended with great cruelty, 

 and the results are of little or no good ; they should therefore be dis- 

 allowed. The former deny the truth of the proposition, and maintain 

 that it is tyranny to put in force the power of the law to prevent a few, 

 a very few, men of known reputation as trained physiologists perform- 

 ing occasional experiments, often unattended by pain, for the sake of 

 advantages which they believe to be enormous. To endeavor to make 

 vivisection a question of ethics, when moral considerations are alto- 

 gether and confessedly ignored in a thousand other instances, is clearly 

 illogical, and obviously prompted by an undue bias. In other words, 

 the selection of the so-called standard of "morality," or of the "rights 

 of animals," by which to measure the permissibility of physiological 

 experimentation, is undeniably a prejudgment of the real point at 

 issue. Contemporary Revieic. 







BORAX m AMERICA. 



By W. 0. AYEES, M. D. 



BORAX is now well known to occur in very many of the salt- 

 springs in the Coast Mountains of California. But in only two 

 places has it been found in large quantities: these are Borax Lake and 

 Hachinhama (pronounced Hati -chin-ha r -ma), both being in the im- 

 mediate vicinity of Clear Lake, about eighty miles north of San 

 Francisco. 



Borax Lake is a shallow pool intensely of alkaline water, without 

 inlet or outlet, and of course its extent depends on its reception of rain- 

 water. After an exceptionally wet season it has a length of perhaps 

 a mile and a half, with a depth of eight to ten feet ; after an excep- 



