574 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



surroundings of the mud huts of the present 

 generation. The water of the Nile holds in 

 its volume an unusually large percentage of 

 air ; and it is probably due to this circum- 

 stance that it is so healthful and palatable 

 even at its reddest. The crop seasons are 

 divided into three different productive pe- 

 riods : the autumn, or nili August till the 

 end of November ; the period of flood, in 

 which maize, millet, sesame, and a few minor 

 crops are grown; the summer, or sefi 

 April till July ; the warm-weather period, in 

 which tropical and semi-tropical crops rice, 

 sugar, and cotton are produced ; and the 

 winter, or shitaioi December to March, or 

 cold-weather period when the European 

 crops, grown in a temperate climate, come 

 to maturity. 



Spring Two Hundred Tears ago and 

 now. Has change of climate within histori- 

 cal times, Dr. P. H. Pye-Smith asks, brought 

 about change of diseases ? "I think," he 

 says, " we may assert that, with a few im- 

 portant exceptions, such as the draining 

 which has led to the general disappearance 

 of malaria, and the improved habitations of 

 the poor, which have made plague unknown 

 and typhus rare, no such changes have taken 

 place ; and in particular that there is no foun- 

 dation for the opinion that in former time the 

 English spring was milder than at present. 

 ' The uncertain glory of an April day ' was as 

 uncertain at the close of the sixteenth as at 

 the close of the nineteenth century. In the 

 seventeenth century the great Earl of Veru- 

 lam met his death from standing in the snow 

 on Highgate Hill on Easter Monday, and Eve- 

 lyn remarks, under date of March 27, 1681, 

 ' An extraordinary sharp spring, not a leaf yet 

 on the trees.' In the eighteenth century 

 Horace Walpole writes that ' the spring has 

 set in with its usual severity ' ; and the con- 

 trast between poetical description of the 

 ' ethereal mildness of spring ' and its actual 

 inclemency has become a commonplace of 

 satire." 



Typhoid Fever and Sewage in Drink- 

 ing-water. Outbreaks of typhoid fever oc- 

 curred in several of the half-dozen cities and 

 towns situated near the junction of the Hud- 

 son and Mohawk Rivers during the winter of 

 1890-91, and, while their cause can not be 



fixed with certainty, Prof. William P. Mason, 

 of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, holds 

 that there is good reason to attribute them 

 to a contaminated water-supply. In a paper 

 read to the Franklin Institute he states that 

 every one of these places drains into the 

 Hudson River or its tributary, the Mohawk. 

 There were epidemics of tvphoid fever in 

 Cohoes, West Troy, and Albany, which take 

 their supplies of water from one or the other 

 of these rivers ; but in Waterford and Lan- 

 singburg, which take water from the Hudson 

 above this group of towns ; in Troy, which 

 uses in part a similar supply and depends 

 partly on the lakes back in the hills ; also on 

 Green Island, opposite Troy, which obtains 

 sand-filtered river-water from wells, there 

 was little or no fever besides imported cases. 

 Ice-cutters at Van Wie's Point, four miles 

 below Albany, who used the river-water for 

 drinking, also had the fever break out among 

 them. It is true that typhoid germs were not 

 found in the water, but the facts above cited 

 are certainly worthy of careful consideration. 



Sulphuring Dried Frnit. The dainty 

 whiteness which commercial dried fruits 

 have taken on within a few years is due to 

 an unwholesome bleaching by means of the 

 fumes of burning sulphur, which is practiced 

 in the drying factories. Fruit-driers say that 

 sulphuring makes the fruit dry quicker, keep 

 better, and sell better. But these advantages 

 do not benefit the consumer, who suffers the 

 disadvantages, which are loss of flavor, im- 

 possibility of distinguishing unripe and poor 

 fruit from good, and the presence of sulphide 

 of zinc in fruit that is dried on trays having 

 a zinc surface. This matter is thoroughly 

 ventilated in the Transactions of the Ameri- 

 can Public Health Association by Dr. Joel 

 W. Smith, who says further that the con- 

 tamination with sulphide of zinc was the 

 reason why American evaporated apples were 

 excluded from Germany. He also quotes 

 from a paper read by J. L. Mosher at a fruit- 

 growers' convention in California the state- 

 ment that " if fruit be picked before ripe, 

 and over-sulphured to produce whiteness, it 

 is devoid of its true rich taste and flavor, and 

 only requires polishing to make buttons." 



Physiology of Over - exertion. Perti- 

 nently to the death of a young Englishman, 



