328 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was by no means uncommon for iron rails to be removed from 

 the track worn out before they bad been subjected to a single 

 season's wear. About that time the Bessemer steel rail was in- 

 troduced, and its hard, homogeneous metal offered great resist- 

 ance to the wear and abrasion of the rolling wheels. But a new 

 difficulty appeared ; for, while the steel rails suffered but little 

 from wear, they developed a provoking tendency to break with- 

 out giving any previous warning, which served to increase the 

 danger of railroad traveling. Upon the discovery of this evil, 

 the engineers in charge neither discarded the Bessemer rails, nor 

 did they close their eyes to its obvious defects, but, in imitation 

 of our social concerns, they kept acurate statistics of the life and 

 breakage of the rails, and finally discovered that, in the effort to 

 resist the tendency to wear, they had gone so far as to make the 

 metal brittle ; hence the saving to wear was partly lost because of 

 the failure of rails by breaking. Less carbon was put into the 

 steel, and a softer metal was produced, which, while vastly supe- 

 rior to iron as against lamination and abrasion, was sufficiently 

 soft to avoid the breaking, with its attendant dangers. 



Do not the facts disclosed by our social statistics cause it to 

 appear that, in the adjustment of our schools, we have gone too 

 far in our aim for material advancement and development of 

 wealth, and that we are correspondingly losing in the direction 

 of moral growth and culture ? Let us, then, imitate the prudence 

 of the railway engineer, and, though seeking to retain the ad- 

 vantages which are already ours, let us not be blind to the visible 

 defects and besetting dangers of our present system. Let us de- 

 termine the composition of the training of our public schools; 

 let us see if its parts are well proportioned and the compound 

 skillfully wrought, and a thorough analysis may prove, as with 

 the Bessemer steel rail, that, by a judicious change in the nature 

 or proportion of the ingredients, our rapid increase of wealth 

 may suffer a trifling diminution, but the moral balance of educa- 

 tion will be restored, and material, political, and moral progress 

 will move forward together. 



Is his presidential address to the Royal Geographical Society, President 

 Strachey, assuming that the last barrier excluding us from unknown regions would 

 soon he broken through, named the establishment of the supremacy of modern 

 civilization and progress over Africa as the next geographical problem. That con- 

 tinent presents wholly different conditions from any other land that has been 

 brought under civilization, and will call for different methods of management. It 

 can not be directly colonized, as were North America and Australia, or adminis- 

 tered as India is ; and amalgamation between European settlers and the indigenous 

 races is wholly out of the question. The operation will necessarily be a long and, 

 in some respects, a painful one. 



