222 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as the price of disinfecting a room of a hundred cubic metres. The 

 burner costs ten dollars, but it will last for a very long time. This 

 process is evidently practicable and convenient. It does not tarnish 

 metallic objects, and furnishes a continuous, slow, and regular disen- 

 gagement of the disinfecting gas. Translated for the Popular Sci- 

 ence Monthly from La Nature. 



-++- 



THE MEDITERRANEAN OF CANADA. 



By J. MACDONALD OXLEY. 



IN the month of February last a report was laid before the Parlia- 

 ment of Canada detailing the results of an expedition dispatched 

 by the Government of that country particularly for the purpose of in- 

 quiring into the navigability of Hudson Strait and Bay, and, at the 

 same time, of gathering information concerning the resources of that 

 region, and its availability as a field for settled habitation. This report 

 represents the first properly organized attempt that has ever been made 

 to pierce the secrets of Hudson Bay for the public benefit. 



It is at first blush not easy to understand why this mighty expanse 

 of water, occupying the peculiarly important position that it does, 

 should remain for so many generations comparatively unexplored, and 

 wholly unutilized, except as a hunting-ground for a few New Bedford 

 whalers, or a medium of easy communication between some half-dozen 

 scattered factories of the Hudson Bay Company. Although called a 

 bay, it is really an inland sea, 1,000 miles in length by 600 in width, 

 having thus an area of about 500,000 square miles, or quite half that 

 of the Mediterranean. It drains an expanse of country spreading out 

 more than 2,000 miles from east to west, and 1,500 from north to south, 

 or an area of 3,000,000 square miles. Into its majestic waters pour 

 feeders which take their rise in the Rocky Mountains on the west and 

 in Labrador on the east, while southward it stretches out its river-roots 

 away below the 49th parallel until they tap the same lake-source which 

 sends a stream into the Gulf of Mexico. Despite its distance north- 

 ward, its blue waves are never bound by icy fetters, and its broad gate- 

 way to the Atlantic is certainly navigable four months out of the year, 

 and possibly all the year round to properly equipped steamships. Its 

 depths abound in finny wealth, from the mammoth whale to the tiny 

 caplin. Its shores are serrated by numerous streams, some navigable 

 for long distances inland, and all stocked with the finest of fresh-water 

 fish, and clothed as to their banks with valuable timber ready for the 

 lumberman's axe. Its islands are rich in mineral ore of many kinds. 

 The country whose margin its tides lave is well adapted for tillage and 

 pasturage, while all around the region swarms with animals and birds 



