510 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



is reached, and a hole is made in the skull 

 £S large as a silver dollar. Of course, if 

 the operation is carried a little too far, the 

 patient dies; and this appears to be the 

 mode in which most of the cures are effect- 

 ed, death being the result in about half the 

 cases operated upon. The hole is usually 

 covered with a piece of cocoa-nut shell, 

 scraped thin, and placed under the scalp. 

 Formerly, the instrument employed was a 

 shark's tooth, but broken glass is found to 

 act better. Bone-scraping is also resorted 

 to as a cure for rheumatism in old people. 

 The skin is cut open, so as to lay bare the 

 bone supposed to be affected, and the sur- 

 face of the latter is then scraped until a 

 portion of the external lamina is removed. 

 Here surely the remedy is worse than the 

 disease." 



Picw French Life-saving Raft,— An ex- 

 traordinary safety-raft has recently been 

 invented in France. It is described as 

 large enough to support from 400 to 600 

 persons, as neither incumbering nor requir- 

 ing any alteration in the arrangement of 

 vessels, and as needing only a minute or 

 two to inflate and launch it. It is an air- 

 tight mattress, with a surface of nearly 900 

 square feet, inflated in one minute, it is said, 

 from a reservoir fixed in the engine-room, 

 and always charged with air under a press- 

 ure of fifteen atmospheres. When not in 

 use it is rolled up, and takes no more room 

 than a boat. When inflated it falls over the 

 side of the vessel, against which it is re- 

 tained by ropes till all the persons on board 

 are transferred to the raft. Three strong 

 spars, passing through the whole length of 

 the raft, keep it flat and solid. 



Training Slieplierd-dogs . — Sheep- raise rs 

 in California have an ingenious system for 

 training dogs to guard their flocks. In 

 Southern California one may wander for 

 miles, and see thousands of sheep without 

 a single shepherd to watch them, but around 

 each flock half a dozen dogs. These have 

 the entire care of the sheep, drive them out 

 to pasture in the morning, keep them from 

 straying during the day, and bring them 

 home at night. These animals have inher- 

 ited a talent for keeping sheep, and this 

 talent is cultivated in the following way: 



When a lamb is born, or the shepherds 

 have a pup which they want to train, the 

 lamb is taken from its mother, she not 

 being allowed to see her ofi'spring, and the 

 puppy is put in its place, and the sheep 

 suckles it. When the puppy grows old 

 enough to eat meat, it is fed in the morn- 

 ing and sent out with the sheep. It stays 

 with them, because it is accustomed to be 

 with its foster-mother ; but it cannot feed 

 with them, and, as they get full, the dog 

 grows hungry. At length, impatient to re- 

 turn, in hopes to get its meat, the dog be- 

 gins to tease and worry the mother, and 

 finally starts her toward home ; the others 

 follow, and thus the whole flock is brought 

 in. If they are brought home too early, or 

 the dog comes without them, he gets pun- 

 ished in some way ; and thus, by taking 

 advantage of their instincts and appetite, 

 these dogs are trained to a great state of 

 perfectness, and become invaluable to the 

 owners of large flocks. 



Legislative Blunders. — The Pall Mall 

 Gazette thus indicts the English Public 

 Health Act of 1872 : "Its failure, now that 

 this has become too clear to be disputed, 

 turns out to be of a more than usually in- 

 structive kind ; for it shows that, contrary 

 to all expectation and probability, there 

 was, in 18'72, still a blunder remaining for 

 us to commit in sanitary administration, 

 and that we have since committed it. We 

 had already exhausted every source of ad- 

 ministrative ineflSciency which is to be found 

 in inadequacy of powers, defects of initia- 

 tive, and obscure intricacy of law. We had 

 set up sanitary authorities who could not 

 act, authorities who would not act, and au- 

 thorities who did not know when, where, 

 and how to act: it remained for us to 

 establish authorities who could and must 

 act, and then to misdirect and mislead them 

 into a confusion worse than inactivity. 

 Having failed in every possible way at the 

 circumference, we had yet to fail at the cen- 

 tre, and we have done it." 



Sknck-Madness. — Rev. Horace C. Hovey, 

 in the American Journal of Science, gives 

 some novel results of a protracted inquiry 

 concerning the common skunk {Mephitis 

 mephitica). He says that, at times when 



