652 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and with power to enforce its orders that is, the Labor Board 

 should have the same power over the parties to a labor dispute 

 that a court has over the parties to a legal dispute, and its juris- 

 diction should not depend upon the consent of both parties. 

 Either side should possess the right to compel the other to submit 

 the matter to the board ; and if both sides refuse for a long time 

 to submit to arbitration, and the public interests are endangered, 

 it might be expedient to give a certain number of the public 

 at large the right by request or petition addressed to the board 

 to invoke its jurisdiction. With these powers exercised by a tri- 

 bunal of disinterested persons it is believed that wages would be 

 raised to the point of fairness, that the honest employer would be 

 protected from the competition of the dishonest employer, that 

 strikes and lockouts would cease, and that the eight-hour day 

 would soon become an accomplished fact. 



MICA AND THE MICA MINES. 



By C. HANFORD HENDERSON. 



ONE can get little pleasure out of a science until one is toler- 

 ably familiar with its nomenclature and terminology. We 

 should make even less than we do out of human history if we 

 were not fairly familiar with the language in which it is written. 

 If the words " institution," " government," " constitution " did not 

 convey correspondingly definite ideas, we should be at a loss to in- 

 terpret the pages of even our more obvious historians. In natural 

 history it is much the same thing, and it is for this reason, I think, 

 that so many make very little out of it. They never get to feel 

 quite at home among the scientific terms which must needs be 

 used. It may seem like insisting upon a very obvious truth to 

 point out that, when we define or describe a thing in terms un- 

 known to the hearer, we do not define or describe it at all ; but 

 nevertheless I believe that it is what Mill would have called a 

 luminous platitude. It is certainly a commonplace more notice- 

 able in the breach than in the observance. 



A party of two or three are out on a tramp. Perhaps one of 

 the number is a botanist. He is pretty sure to be besieged with 

 questions : What is this ? What is that ? and all asked in evi- 

 dent good faith. One of the tramps picks up a little beach fern 

 and rushes off to the Linnaeus of the party to know what it is. 

 Linnaeus looks at it, and answers with all good intentions that it 

 is a Phegopteris dryopteris. The non-botanical member thanks 

 him, perhaps says, " Oh, is it ? " as if it were a perfectly intelli- 



