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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pupils in such a way as to develop or aggra- 

 vate in any of them nervous irritation? 

 Does or does not the no-recess plan affect 

 the pelvic organs ? Does it or docs it not 

 affect the eye-sight ? Does it or does it not 

 affect the nasal passages and lungs ? How 

 do the physical exercises substituted by the 

 no-recess plan for those of the recess affect 

 relatively the rapidity of the pulse of the 

 pupils, when it is compared to the rapidity 

 developed in the exercises of the out-door 

 recess? Answers may be sent to J. H. 

 Hoose, State Normal School, Cortland, N. Y. 



Pacific Coast Panthers. A correspond- 

 ent, "Forked Deer," in "Forest and 

 Stream," communicates some notes on the 

 habits of the panther as he has observed 

 them in the Pacific coast region. He ex- 

 presses surprise that the settlers should 

 have given this animal a different name 

 California or mountain lion from the East- 

 ern animal, for the " two panthers are so 

 nearly alike that no one would dream, upon 

 comparing them, of regarding them as dis- 

 tinct species." Yet " the panther of the 

 West coast never indulges, for his own en- 

 tertainment, in those fierce, cat-like screams 

 with which his Eastern brother occasionally 

 makes night hideous." The correspondent 

 has a growing skepticism in regard to pan- 

 thers ever willingly attacking a man. " I 

 have known them," he says, " on several 

 occasions to follow persons a short distance, 

 and I have seen wolves do the same thing, 

 especially when I have been packing in 

 freshly-killed meat, but I do not believe 

 that in either case they meditated an attack. 

 In one instance, in the Cascades, near the 

 Hood, I knew a panther to jump at a man 

 as he lay at night in his blankets, but as 

 soon as the man partly arose and shouted 

 for assistance the animal bounded into the 

 brush and disappeared. In talking it over, 

 we all came to the conclusion that the pan- 

 ther had seen the man move under his 

 blankets, and had mistaken him for some 

 less formidable antagonist, and that when 

 the deception was revealed to him he threw 

 up the job at once. . . . That the panther 

 will run from the smallest yelping cur that 

 can be induced to follow his trail is true, 

 but I am satisfied that instinct . . . warns 

 them of the hunter behind the dog, and 



that it is the latter only which they fear. 

 Panthers ascend the immense trees near 

 the mouth of the Columbia, which are 

 frequently three hundred feet high, and 

 sixty, eighty, or even a hundred feet to the 

 first limb, precisely as a cat would climb 

 them, and when wounded will sometimes go 

 to the very top. Although they may in 

 some places spend the day lying upon the 

 limb of a tree, they are believed to prefer 

 rocky ledges and caverns, where they are 

 accessible, for that purpose." 



Cremation of Household and City Refuse. 



The ultimate of sanitation, Mr. J. M. 

 Keating, of Memphis, Term., argued in his 

 address before the American Public Health 

 Association, last fall, must be by fire. In 

 support of his thesis, he proved by the 

 citation of dozens of instances in the con- 

 dition of European and American cities, 

 towns, rivers, water-sheets, public institu- 

 tions, and private houses, that when the 

 people do not complain of polluted water, 

 as they have to do in most cities, they do 

 of sewer-gas ; that when resting seemingly 

 secure in an approximately good system of 

 sewerage, they have to complain of the 

 means for and methods of sewage dis- 

 posal ; that by the London method, so ex- 

 haustively expensive, the Thames is still 

 nothing better than a wide-open sewer ; that 

 the Paris method is only partial, and too ex- 

 pensive, and altogether impossible for large 

 cities ; that by the New York method the 

 docks are filled with excreta, and the en- 

 trance to the harbor is threatened by bars 

 formed of the street and house wastes, car- 

 ried out to sea at great expense by barges ; 

 that rivers are being destroyed by sewage 

 which kills the fish and make what was 

 once a source of health a permanent nui- 

 sance ; that as privies and cess-pools are 

 condemned because they saturate the soil, 

 sewers are to be condemned, in some in- 

 stances, for the same reason, and because 

 they throw off and fill dwellings with sewer- 

 gas, and docks and harbors and rivers with 

 death-dealing sewage ; and that all present 

 plans of sewage disposal are defective be- 

 cause they are not final, because they merely 

 contemplate the removal and not the de- 

 struction of what is conceded to be the 

 prime factor in promoting and perpetuat- 



