858 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



boys, 3,813; women and girls, only 1,080. 

 When the baths were first opened the policy 

 was to have as many free days as possible, 

 but it was found quite impossible to keep 

 order even with the aid of a police officer. 

 Under a new arrangement by which a fee of 

 five cents was charged, which included soap, 

 towels, and bathing dress, a great improve- 

 ment was manifested, even this small fee 

 seeming to make the bathers more self-re- 

 specting and conscientious and doing away 

 with that irresponsible and reckless feeling 

 which an unadulterated eharity seems so 

 prone to produce. Instead of the fees de- 

 creasing the number of bathers, there was a 

 constant and steady increase. An interest- 

 ing experiment in connection with these 

 baths is the giving of instruction in swim- 

 ming to the public-school children. The 

 town pays for this through the school com- 

 mittee. The pupils as well as the teach- 

 ers have taken great interest, and already 

 large numbers have been taught how to 

 swim. At the end of the school year there 

 will be thorough tests, and certificates of 

 proficiency will be given. Aside from the 

 value which this bath has as a swimming 

 school and healthy recreation ground for the 

 children, its successful continuance can not 

 fail to have a most beneficial effect on the 

 general personal cleanliness and sanitation 

 of the town, a clean individual being much 

 less patient with nasty streets and houses 

 and neighbors, than a dirty one. The im- 

 portance of the public bath does not seem 

 to be generally appreciated in this country. 

 It is when properly handled one of the most 

 powerful and far reaching of the munici- 

 palities' institutions for promoting cleanli- 

 ness, both mental and physical, and good 

 citizenship; in several of the European 

 states where this fact has been appreciated 

 the publie baths of the cities and towns are 

 among their most important institutions. 



Industrial Instability in Russia. — In- 

 dustrial labor in Russia, as pictured in the 

 bulletin of the Mvsee . Social, is usually un- 

 stable and can not be depended upon. In 

 most of the shops the workmen scatter at 

 once in the spring. The operatives who 

 come in after the Easter vacation, which 

 lasts several weeks, are generally new ones, 

 who have never worked in that kind of in- 



dustry, and a new apprenticeship is neces- 

 sary. Hence arises an obstacle to the de- 

 velopment of professional skill. The new 

 hands are very awkward, and are more 

 quickly tired than those who are accustomed 

 to work methodically. The workman is con- 

 tinually changing his place, and passes from 

 one trade to another, as he would from one 

 place to another, becoming now a shop oper- 

 ative and now an agricultural laborer. As 

 M. Anatole Leroy Beaulieu says, he is a 

 nomad. He is not identified with his ma- 

 chine, does not understand it, and does not 

 know how to bring out its latent power. 

 Hence in many industries which have been 

 long organized on the grand scale in the 

 West, the Russian does better work at home 

 in the old way than can be turned out in the 

 factories. Besides this, the Russian work- 

 ing class takes to machines with a bad grace, 

 and will not use them except under compul- 

 sion. A curious condition, resulting partly 

 from this disposition, is that when crops are 

 good and the demand for manufactured 

 products is lively, the workmen abandon the 

 shops because they can live without the 

 labor. It is of no use to raise wages, for 

 that offers no attraction to the peasant who 

 has enough to live upon in his usual way. 

 While in the West the best-fed workman is 

 the most efficient, in Russia the one who is 

 satisfied is the most idle. Where women 

 are found in the shops, it is an indication of 

 improvement and of better development and 

 more stable conditions. 



Defects of the Metric System. — An ad- 

 mirable summary of the arguments against 

 the enforced adoption of the metric system 

 of weights and measures is presented by Mr. 

 George W. Colles, in a paper read by him 

 before the American Society of Mechanical 

 Engineers. Having examined what has been 

 said in favor of the system and against it, 

 he concludes that the claim for its scientific 

 accuracy is not justified, none of its units 

 being what it purports to be ; that the 

 metre, as a scientific standard, can claim no 

 superiority over the yard, and leaves us, 

 moreover, without that most useful of meas- 

 ures, the foot ; that while uniformity, carried 

 too far, is of doubtful advantage, the metric 

 system in practice has generally served not 

 to introduce but to destroy it, by superadd- 



