112 NOTES. 



running water add to its impurity and unfitness for drinking pur- 

 poses, has long been shown to be erroneous. As long as they are 

 in a growing condition, they can only tend to purify the water by 

 giving out oxygen into it. In a paper in the Archives fiir Hygien 

 (1894, No. 2), Dr. T. Bokorny maintains that aquatic bacteria 

 also have a share in the purification of water, so long as it con- 

 tains a considerable quantity of organic matter. A series of 

 experiments carried on by the author showed the algae are capable 

 of decomposing fatty acids, such as butyric and valerianic, as also 

 glucose, leucin, and tyrosin. 



Canada Balsam Fir. — The following note from the Drug 

 Reporter will be interesting to microscopists : — 



" While there has been little or no increase in the consump- 

 tion of Canada balsam within the past five years, the supply has 

 been gradually diminishing, partly as a result of natural conditions, 

 and partly because the work of gathering has been, to an extent, 

 neglected. The collection of balsam fir is not a regular industry, 

 but has been prosecuted by lumbermen and labourers in other 

 fields, who devoted their leisure to it. So long as the balsam 

 could be obtained near by the markets to which the gatherers 

 bring it, the supply was ample and regular ; but with the cutting- 

 down of the Canadian forests for timber the source of supply has 

 been further and further removed from commercial centres, and the 

 collection of the balsam has not proved profitable enough, for a 

 number of years past, to encourage those who heretofore engaged 

 in it to continue to bring it to market. 



In some years the supply has been larger than in others, owing 

 to the scarcity of other employment, and in view of the wide- 

 spread distress among the labouring classes, including the Canadian 

 lumberman, during the past eighteen months or more, it would be 

 natural to expect that these people would have turned their attention 

 to the gathering of balsam as a means of livehhood. Such, how- 

 ever, does not appear to have been the case, for according to 

 reliable reports the quantity collected this year was very small, not 

 exceeding fifty barrels. This small yield was partly due to wet 

 weather toward the end of the gathering season — late August and 

 early September — but the chief reason for it is that the gatherers 

 found it unprofitable to go so far into the interior for the balsam 

 as they are now compelled to go. 



