204 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



whicli reticence and a feeling of insignificance are struggling 

 with each other for supremacy. 



Americans have faults and are not more sensitive to having 

 them pointed out than other people, but the tendency among de- 

 scendants of Anglo-Saxon stock to resent the imputation of the 

 possession of visual motes by ill-tempered owners of larger ocular 

 imperfections is deeply rooted. We have not for many a long day 

 seen an article in a prominent English journal so well designed, 

 by its gratuitous disparagements of America, to keep alive the 

 fast-expiring dislike to the mother country that it is to the 

 interest of all of us to see buried. 



-- 



HEALTH EXPERIMENTS IN THE FRENCH ARMY. 



By STODDARD DEWEY. 



THE report made to the French Parliament in April of this 

 year by General Zurlinden, Minister of War, discloses a new 

 aspect of that life in barracks to which the armed peace of Eu- 

 rope condemns all her young men for a period of their best years. 

 It is nothing less than an experimenting on a giant scale with the 

 health and resistance to epidemic disease of French youth under 

 military regimen. 



The first and most fatal enemy has always been typhoid fever. 



In 1887 the annual number of cases reached eight thousand, 

 with a death-rate of about eight hundred, for much less than five 

 hundred thousand men. This gave an average of deaths from 

 this single disease very nearly equivalent to two out of every 

 thousand men, while the total mortality of the army was only 

 8"43 per thousand. In the mortality of French civil life, which 

 remains at eleven per thousand, the destructiveness of typhoid 

 fever is still greater, at least in a large number of towns and 

 cities. 



Doctors have long known the cause of the prevalence of this 

 disease ; but it is not easy to persuade the ordinary citizen of the 

 necessity of precaution in the use of so common a thing as water. 

 Jules Simon tells a story, good by way of illustration, of the 

 alarming typhoid epidemic in Paris a few years ago. Both doc- 

 tors and Government had warned the people that the germs of 

 the disease were contained in the water of the Seine, and that 

 only filtered and boiled water could be used safely. One day a 

 cafe waiter was discovered replenishing the drinking decanter of 

 his customers from the common spigot giving forth the river 

 water in its unadulterated impurity. When reproached with his 

 deed, he answered indignantly : 



