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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cities shall no longer convert tbe natural 

 waterways into sewers, and the lakes into 

 reservoirs for their sewage? Methods of 

 sewage di^posal and disinfection have been 

 already so far perfected that, in ray opinion, 

 at no distant day, compulsory destruction of 

 all offensive and dangerous waste material, 

 of whatsoever kind, may be legally enforced 

 without serious expense or inconvenience. 

 Again, are we quite rational in the relative 

 estimate we place upon our most cherished 

 possessions? Do we not strangely, insanely 

 underrate health and life, and overrate 

 greatly the mere things which possess abso- 

 lutely no value at all apart from life and 

 health ? " These conclusions are strikingly 

 enforced in the lesson of the recent outbreak 

 of typhoid fever at Wesleyan University, 

 that has been traced to the eating of oysters 

 raw which had been exposed to contamina- 

 tion in their temporary storage bed by a 

 drain leading from a house where there was 

 typhoid fever. 



The Peopling of America. In trying to 

 account for the settlement of America by 

 spontaneous migrations, Prof. 0. T. Mason 

 postulates that the emigrants would be 

 drawn, in the quest for food, along the lines 

 of most abundant supply and of least resist- 

 ance. He accepts Morgan's location of the 

 region about the mouth of the Columbia 

 River as the starting point of the migration 

 over the continent. Whence and how did 

 men come to that point ? He finds a route 

 from Asia to America that might have been 

 nearly all the way by sea, and continuously 

 used for centuries ; and which lies absolutely 

 along a great circle of the earth, the shortest 

 and easiest highway. This great circle route 

 lies mostly through landlocked waters, and 

 embraces, in order, the northeastern Indo- 

 Malayan Archipelago, the South China and 

 Malay Seas, the East China and Yellow Seas, 

 the Japanese and Tartary Seas, the Okhotsk 

 Sea and environs, the Bering Sea with its 

 bays, the Alaskan Sea and inlets, the Tlinget- 

 Haide Sea, the Vancouver Sea, and the Co- 

 lumbia Basin. The same great circle would 

 go on to include the head waters of all the 

 Rocky Mountain streams, the great interior 

 basin, the Pueblo region, Mexico, Central 

 America, Ecuador, and Peru. Along it food 

 is abundant, no point is at a very great dis- 



tance from land, and all the conditions are 

 as favorable as could be found anywhere to 

 the success of a voyager. Hence Prof. Ma- 

 son advances the hypothesis that during the 

 centuries in which Europe was working out 

 of its earliest stone age into its renascence, 

 certainly for three thousand years or more, 

 America was being steadily and continuously 

 peopled from Asia by way of its eastern 

 shores and seas from the Indian Ocean. 

 Subsidiary movements in the way of off- 

 shoots from this migration, contributions to 

 it, and barriers to its progress took place 

 up and down the rivers and in the seas of 

 India, China, Mongolia, and Siberia. The 

 author disclaims any reliance upon theories 

 of sunken continents, upon voyages across 

 the profound sea without food or motive, 

 the accidental stranding of junks, or the 

 aimless wandering of lost tribes ; assumes 

 that there never was known to history a day 

 when the Asiatic and American continents 

 were not intimately associated ; and con- 

 cludes that " when the continent of America 

 was peopled it was done by men and women 

 purposely engaged in what all sensible peo- 

 ple are now doing namely, trying to get all 

 the enjoyment possible out of life for their 

 efforts." 



The Critical Facnlty in Engineering. 



The presidential address of Prof. A. B. W. 

 Kennedy, of the Section of Mechanical 

 Science, in the British Association, was 

 devoted to the critical side of mechanical 

 training the training to think about a sub- 

 ject, to write upon it, and to come to a ra- 

 tional decision, by exercising a critical sense 

 of proportion which could be best developed 

 by a course of quantitative experimental 

 work in an engineering laboratory. After 

 observing that an engineer was a man who 

 was continually called upon to make up his 

 mind irrevocably in a very short time gen- 

 erally about one tenth of the time which he 

 would like to give to the subject the author 

 pointed out that there was an essential dif- 

 ference between the problems of the mathe- 

 matician and those of the engineer. In pure 

 science and mathematics there was little 

 room for the critical faculty the result was 

 either right or wTong. In engineering there 

 might be many solutions, and the critical 

 faculty must be rapidly supplied to the prob- 



