POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



57i 



as often wholly upon the surface, or else, 

 farther north, they are the well-known snow- 

 house. The people do not live a torpid ex- 

 istence in winter, but an extremely busy 

 and active one, in employments which call 

 out the energies, in some shape or anoth- 

 er, of the whole family. The eating of raw 

 flesh, which has been attributed to this 

 people, is exceptional and usually practiced 

 only under stress. The enormous consump- 

 tion of fat, also, " supposed to be a physio- 

 logical necessity to enable them to with- 

 stand the excessive cold, is probably the 

 exception rather than the rule, to judge 

 from the accounts of actual observers. It 

 seems quite probable that the amount con- 

 sumed in most cases is little, if any, greater 

 than that eaten by civilized nations, when 

 we consider that the people who eat the fat 

 of the seal with the flesh, and use oil for a 

 sauce to their dried salmon, have no butter, 

 cream, fat bacon, olive-oil, or lard." The 

 French authors correct one popular error 

 in regard to the relative stature of the 

 Eskimos, and declare that they are but 

 little below the medium stature, having an 

 average height of about five feet three inch- 

 es, while " medium stature," according to 

 Topinard, in five feet four inches. In com- 

 paring several series of measurements of 

 Eskimos, only one was found that at all 

 corroborates the popular opinion of their 

 small size, and that gave the average height 

 of twenty-three men at Cumberland Gulf as 

 five feet 24 inches, still above Topinard's 

 standard of small stature (five feet one and 

 a half inch or less). 



The Coming Solar Eclipse. The total 

 eclipse of the sun of August 19th will occur 

 under circumstances offering unusual facili- 

 ties for concurrent observation. The line 

 of totality crosses Asia and Europe from 

 Japan to the British Islands, and the phe- 

 nomenon can be observed with the sun at a 

 good height from all places on this line east 

 of Moscow. Among these points are Tver, 

 Petrovsk, Kineshma, Perm, Tobolsk, Tomsk, 

 Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and several stations 

 in Japan, where the opportunities for ob- 

 serving will be even better than in Russia 

 and Siberia. Professor C. A. Young will 

 have a station at Tver, and parties of 

 English and Italian astronomers will ob- 



serve in the neighborhood. As nearly all 

 the points in Russia and Siberia are con- 

 nected by telegraph, the observing parties 

 will have facilities for instantaneous com- 

 munication with one another. 



Disposal of Sewage and Garbage. Mr. 



W. Howard White has given to the Ameri- 

 can Society of Civil Engineers his views as 

 to the comparative value and feasibility of 

 five different methods of disposing of sew- 

 age and garbage. The method of dry re- 

 moval is still in most general use, and costs, 

 in Leeds, England, including removal of 

 ashes and garbage, twenty-four cents per 

 head a year. The great defect of removal 

 by water-carriage, such as prevails in all 

 large cities, is that usually it only takes the 

 nuisance to another place, without abating 

 it. This fact, and the failure of the cur- 

 rents depended upon to carry the stuff far 

 enough away, have led to the introduction 

 of the method of water-carriage with works 

 for purification by precipitation. This is 

 effected at the Knostrop Works, Leeds, by 

 means of a set of settling-basins, with milk 

 of lime as the precipitant. At Frankfort, 

 alumina ferric is to be used. The method 

 of water-carriage, with filtration or irriga- 

 tion, can be applied with great advantage 

 in small towns ; but in cities of more than 

 one hundred thousand inhabitants it is met 

 by the difficulty of getting enough land to 

 make the effectual application of filtration 

 or irrigation practicable. The method of 

 dry removal and making up into salable 

 products is practiced on a large scale at 

 Manchester, England. Urine and feces 

 partially deodorized with the house-ashes 

 are converted into manure and a variety of 

 useful compounds at a cost of from twenty- 

 four to thirty-seven cents per head a year. 

 The Liernur separate pneumatic system is 

 judged to be more expensive than any other 

 well-arranged method. In some places in 

 England and in Holland, refuse not suitable 

 for the sewers is burned in destructors at 

 small cost. At Leeds, the stuff is fed at 

 the top of the apparatus, and works down 

 gradually to the grate, where fire once started 

 is kept up by the refuse itself. Dr. C. Mey- 

 mott Tidy says that no single answer can be 

 given to the question of the disposal of sew- 

 age. The adviser must sink his hobby and 



