422 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consisting of a blade and a handle, or grip, 

 with or without some form of lashing. The 

 blade is either a thin piece of slate ground 

 to an edge, a bit of cherty or flinty rock 

 chipped to an edge, a scrap of steel or iron 

 from wrecks of whaling vessels, or good 

 blades made and sold to Eskimos by traders 

 who visit their country. The handle of 

 this common implement varies greatly in 

 materia], form, and finish. In form alone 

 the specimens from each typical area are 

 unique. Many of the blades are tightly fit- 

 ted into a socket or groove of the handle. 

 The woman's knife is found throughout the 

 Eskimo region, from Labrador to Kadiak, of 

 materials in the handles and the blades de- 

 pendent most largely on what are furnished 

 by the locality. Some of the specimens in 

 the National Museum are as coarse as sav- 

 agery could make them ; others are very 

 beautiful. The same locality furnishes both 

 and intervening kinds ; but some areas fur- 

 nish only coarse work, while others supply 

 the most beautiful. The problem is a com- 

 plex one, and white influence has crept in to 

 embarrass the question. 



Dirt and Cholera. — "Boil your ice," the 

 pithy counsel given by Dr. Daremberg to the 

 people of Paris, in view of the danger of 

 cholera, is made a text by The Lancet for an 

 exhortation to cleanliness. The saying re- 

 fers to the ascertained fact that the cholera 

 germ is not destroyed by freezing, and there 

 may therefore be danger in ice, but there 

 are lessons in it of much wider application. 

 We have made great advances in sanitary 

 practice, or cleanliness, which is the same 

 thing, but are still guilty of a great many 

 faults ; as The Lancet says, speaking of Eng- 

 land, but with apt applicability to our own 

 country : " There are spots in abundance that 

 seem almost to be waiting their opportunity 

 to impress more emphatically the lesson that 

 epidemic cholera and filth go hand in hand. 

 There is the barbarous and revolting midden- 

 stead system of our northern counties, pol- 

 luting air and soil by its emanations and 

 soakage; there are similar systems in the 

 south and elsewhere under which it has be- 

 come a custom to dig two holes in every 

 man's garden and then to pour all liquid filth 

 into one which is called a cesspool, while the 

 drinking-water is drawn from the other one 



which goes by the name of a well. There 

 are houses by the thousand in which the 

 drinking-water is drawn from a cistern which 

 also serves a water-closet, and which is also 

 placed in direct communication with the 

 house-drain by means of its overflow pipe ; 

 and there are houses in every town by the 

 score, and even by the hundred, in which 

 there is no such proper disconnection of 

 house-drain and waste-pipes from the public 

 sewer as to free them from risk of the in- 

 gress of that sewer air from public culverts, 

 which may at any moment be a means of 

 conveying the contagium of imported chol- 

 era. . . . There are communities who delib- 

 erately elect opponents of sanitary reform 

 because they prefer a risk which seems 

 somewhat remote to a certainty of increased 

 rates ; there are public bodies who leave in- 

 dividual inhabitants to perform works of 

 cleanliness and scavenging which they are 

 aware they can not properly carry out ; and 

 there are householders who live on year after 

 year in dwellings into which they know 

 sewer air can make its way by one channel 

 or another — indeed, such people can be 

 everywhere found in abundance." 



Curious Lightning Phenomena. — A curi- 

 ous story is cited in Chambers's Journal of a 

 specimen of the kind of lightning called the 

 fireball, which came down a tailor's chimney 

 in Paris, showing itself the size of a child's 

 head, and moved slowly about the room, at a 

 small height above the floor, looking, as the 

 tailor described it, " like a good-sized kitten 

 rolled up into a ball and moving without 

 showing its paws." It was bright and shin- 

 ing, yet did not seem to give out any heat. 

 After making several excursions in different 

 directions, it rose vertically to the height of 

 a man's head, steered toward a hole in the 

 chimney above the mantel-piece, and made 

 its way into the flue. Shortly afterward 

 there was a violent explosion, which de- 

 stroyed the upper part of the chimney and 

 threw the fragments on to the roofs of some 

 adjoining buildings. The phenomenon of 

 lightning prints is one of which little is yet 

 known, but which deserves attention. Prof. 

 Poey mentions twenty-four cases of impres- 

 sions like photographs made by lightning on 

 the bodies of men and animals. Of these, 

 eight were impressions of trees or parts of 



