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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



articles in the " Gartenlaube," that the 

 Americans are tending toward the Indian 

 type, and that he has observed the resem- 

 blance not only in the face and form, but 

 also in the gestures and movements. A. 

 Miihry, in his work on " Climatology," says 

 that the evaporation is nearly twice as great 

 at New York as at Whitehaven, England, 

 hence the Americans and English live under 

 very different conditions, and exhibit great 

 divergences of temperament. Dr. Carl Re- 

 clam, editor of " Die Gesundheit," compares 

 the air of America and its effects to those 

 of heights, where the lightness and dryness 

 favor extraordinarily the evaporation or ex- 

 halation from the body, and notices in the 

 Americans not only the characteristic physi- 

 cal features induced by such an air, but also 

 " mental peculiarities, traces of which may 

 be seen with us (Europeans) by a careful 

 observer during a dry northeast wind." Mr. 

 Young gives as the result of his own obser- 

 vations, that "the dry air with us pro- 

 duces nervous, energetic, large-jointed skele- 

 tons, which have little or nothing in com- 

 mon with the stout, fresh, rosy, phlegmatic 

 inhabitants of the mother-country. Not 

 only is the physical resemblance lost in the 

 second generation, but the mental also, and 

 ideas especially Britannic give way to ideas 

 peculiarly American, the product of the cli- 

 mate, the soil, and the habits caused by 

 these two factors." With the English the 

 muscular system predominates ; with the 

 Americans, the nervous. American women 

 possess beauty of face, almost never of 

 form ; and even the beauty of face is soon 

 worn out by the drying, irritating effects of 

 the climate and of American life. English 

 women have beauty of form and face, and 

 keep both to an advanced age. 



The Jablochkoff Electric Light in Lon- 

 don. The London Metropolitan Board of 

 Works has recently renewed a contract for 

 one year for lighting the Victoria Embank- 

 ment and Waterloo Bridge with the Jabloch- 

 koff electric light. The Jablochkoff system 

 has been in successful operation on the 

 Thames Embankment since the 13th of 

 December, 1878, when twenty lights were 

 started between Westminster and Waterloo 

 Bridges. Twenty lights, extending the work 

 to Blackfriars Bridge, were added in May, 



1879, and ten more were put on Waterloo 

 Bridge in October last ; ten lights have 

 also been placed in the Victoria Railway 

 station. All of the lights on the Embank- 

 ment have been kept in operation regu- 

 larly for six hours each night since they 

 were first started a fact that is worthy of 

 consideration when it is borne in mind that 

 the machinery was originally arranged for 

 twenty lights only, with no thought that the 

 system was to be extended, and that the 

 changes rendered necessary by each of the 

 two extensions have had to be made with- 

 out interfering with the daily efficiency of 

 the apparatus. The price paid by the Board 

 of Works was, at first, Gd. per light per 

 hour ; it was reduced to 5 d. in the first, and 

 3 d. on the second extension, and has again 

 been reduced on the renewal of the con- 

 tract to 2hd. per light per hour. The 

 Jablochkoff system of electric lighting is 

 now in use under almost every possible 

 condition and in every variety of establish- 

 ment in streets, on bridges, in railway- 

 stations, theatres, circuses, engineering and 

 industrial works, docks, basins, on board 

 steam-vessels, in hotels, and in private resi- 

 dences. King Theebaw, of Burmah, has 

 sixty lights fitted up in his palace at Man- 

 dalay ; the Shah of Persia four, at Teheran ; 

 Prince Agaklam six, at Bombay; and the 

 King of Portugal and the ex-Queen of Spain 

 are also using them. At present, seventeen 

 hundred and sixteen are in use in different 

 countries, one hundred and ninety-eight 

 being in England. 



Coloring of the Waters in Seas and 

 Lakes. Geographers were not able to de- 

 termine why the Red Sea was so named until 

 Ehrenberg, sailing over a part of it, ob- 

 served that the water of the whole Gulf of 

 Tor was colored a blood-red. Drawing up 

 some of the water and examining it with the 

 microscope, he found that the color was due , 

 to a minute, thread-like, dark-red oscilla- 

 toria, or alga. The same alga was ob- 

 served by Dupont twenty years afterward, 

 giving rise to the same appearance over an 

 extent of 256 nautical miles. A similar 

 plant was noticed by Darwin in his voyage 

 round the world, coloring the water near 

 the Abrolhos Islands, off the coast of Bra- 

 zil. Oersted, in 1845, noticed that the 



