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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



might have been expected ; the working of 

 the Education Act, and of several benevolent 

 enterprises in behalf of children, " have 

 brought to light an appalling amount of 

 semi-starvation, ill-treatment, or neglect, to 

 which children are subjected with impunity 

 at the hands of drunken, dissolute, or idle 

 and improvident parents." Thousands of 

 them do not get a single good meal a day, 

 but come breakfastless to school, and their 

 midday meal is provided by a charity. Cases 

 of neglect and cruelty are brought before 

 magistrates against which no statute pro- 

 vision can be found, so that one officer was 

 driven to declare: "Had it been a dog, I 

 could have helped you ; but it is only a 

 child, and I am powerless to assist." The 

 want of paternal responsibility is what drives 

 unmarried mothers to crimes against their 

 offspring. What can they do with them in 

 the situation in which they find themselves ? 

 In such cases the author would make the 

 father of the child jointly liable. Matters 

 are better in most of the American States, 

 but in the majority of cases our own pro- 

 visions lack enormously of what they ought 

 to be. There are practical difficulties in the 

 way of securing adequate protection by law 

 which can not be overlooked ; so that the 

 best that can be done will be short of what 

 is desired. But this only enforces the rea- 

 sons for " doing the best that can be done." 



Strnetnre of the Ether. "We seem," 

 said Prof. Fitzgerald, in the British Associ- 

 ation, " to be approaching a theory as to the 

 structure of the ether. There are difficulties 

 connected with diffusion in the simple theory 

 that it is a fluid full of motion, a sort of vor 

 tex sponge. There are similar difficulties in 

 the wave theory of light, owing to wave prop- 

 agation round corners, and there is as great 

 a difficulty in the jelly theory of the ether 

 arising from the freedom of motion of mat- 

 ter through it. It may be found that there 

 is diffusion, or it may be found that there 

 are polarized distributions of fluid kinetic 

 energy which are not unstable when the sur- 

 faces are fixed ; more than one such is known. 

 Osborne Reynolds has pointed out another, 

 though in my opinion less hopeful, direction 

 in which to look for a theory of the ether. 

 Hard particles are abominations. Perhaps 

 the impenetrability of a vortex would suffice. 



Oliver Lodge speaks confidently of a sort of 

 chemical union of two opposite kinds of ele- 

 ments forming the ether. The opposite side3 

 of a vortex ring might perchance suit, or 

 may be, the ether, after all, is but an at- 

 mosphere of some infra-hydrogen element ; 

 these two latter hypotheses may both come 

 to the same thing. Anyway, we are learn- 

 ing daily what sort of properties the ether 

 must have. It must be the means of propa- 

 gation of light; it must be the means by 

 which electric and magnetic forces exist ; it 

 should explain chemical actions, and, if pos- 

 sible, gravity. On the vortex-sponge theory 

 of the ether there is no real difficulty by 

 reason of complexity why it should not ex- 

 plain chemical actions. In fact, there is 

 every reason to expect that very much more 

 complex actions would take place at dis- 

 tances comparable with the size of the vor- 

 tices than at the distances at which we study 

 the simple phenomena of electro-magnetism. 

 . . The theory that material atoms are 

 simple vortex rings in a perfect liquid other- 

 wise unmoving is insufficient, but with the 

 innumerable possibilities of fluid motion it 

 seems almost impossible but that an expla- 

 nation of the properties of the universe will 

 be found in this connection." 



The " Rabbit Pest " in Australia The 



prevalence of the " rabbit pest " in Austra- 

 lia seems to be largely a result of man's in- 

 discreet interference with the order of na- 

 ture. Hares were introduced for coursing. 

 Pet rabbits were brought over, and a few 

 pairs of gray rabbits were turned out near 

 Geelong, to form a warren. The last lot are 

 believed to have been the fathers of the 

 mischief, although some of the traits of the 

 pets are found among the pests. The rabbit 

 army generally trends toward the north be- 

 cause it started from too near the ocean to 

 advance south. Night travelers along the 

 Murray River used to describe the noise 

 made by the rabbits scampering off from the 

 coach-lights as something like the pattering 

 of a hail-storm. The colonists made a first 

 mistake in having the dingoes, or native 

 dogs, destroyed, because they were danger- 

 ous to the sheep. Then the kangaroos be- 

 gan to multiply, taking advantage of the 

 accommodations provided for the sheep. As 

 soon as they were reduced to manageable 



