354 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



reason for existence leads it to try to show results. Hence the 

 unwillingness of the advocates of " scientific temperance " to let 

 well enough alone. From two pages out of three hundred they 

 have come to insist upon sixty pages out of four hundred. But 

 this will not satisfy. Sooner or later the whole must be con- 

 quered. With every additional page taken from science for tem- 

 perance, they have the basis for a show of results. 



"The natural result of the dictatorship of unscientific peo- 

 ple over a scientific subject is that they require all sorts of 

 the most absurd things. Their success with legislatures has 

 made them arrogant and oppressive in the extreme. These 

 women certainly must be in earnest to be willing to assume to 

 control for the whole country the teaching in the schools of a sub- 

 ject in which they do not profess to be trained ; to assume to dic- 

 tate to those who have made a certain science their life work what 

 they shall and shall not say on this subject ; to be willing to see, 

 indeed to put in motion the machinery which brings about, a form 

 of legislation which further developed would turn the public 

 schools into an instrument which the smartest politicians who 

 could capture them might use to further on any true or false 

 reform or visionary scheme." 



The only remedy for such meddling lies in allowing that sci- 

 ence shall be free to teach its own lessons, and that the public 

 schools shall not be used by advocates of any kind of social or 

 political reform, no matter how meritorious the cause may be in 

 itself. 



The whole " scientific temperance " movement is opposed to the 

 movement for good schools through the choice of good teachers. 

 It has been judged thus far mainly by its motives, which are 

 good. It will come to be judged by its results, and these are bad. 



IN his estimate of the age of Niagara Falls, Mr. J. W. Spencer assumes that 

 the authors of the later computations have failed to take sufficient account of the 

 factors that have caused the rate of recession of the cataract to vary, and of the 

 consequent variation. He has newly examined the channels of the river and the 

 geological evidences they offer, and has incorporated the results in his estimate. 

 He finds that at the nativity of the Niagara River there was no fall. Then the 

 waters sank to the level of Iroquois Beach, and the falls were very much like the 

 modern American cataract in height and volume. This afterward increased in 

 volume and went through a number of changes that are detailed in the author's 

 paper. His computations result in the conclusion that the falls are thirty-one 

 thousand years old, and the river is of thirty-two thousand years' duration. It 

 is further roughly estimated that the lake epoch began fifty or sixty thousand 

 years ago. If the rate of terrestrial deformation continues as it appears to have 

 done, then in about five thousand years, Mr. Spencer thinks, the life of Niagara 

 Falls will cease by the turning of the waters into the Mississippi. 



