592 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rine-Hospital Service with every needed equipment, and if this be 

 done the plague can enter America only through incompetency in 

 that service. There is another source of danger on our Western 

 coast that must not be overlooked. The plague is now widely dis- 

 tributed in Formosa, which is under the control of Japan, and our 

 intercourse with the last-mentioned country should be most care- 

 fully watched. 



TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE AND ITS PKESIDENT. 



BY M. B. THRASHER. 



r I ^USKEGEE is a county town in the State of Alabama, not far 

 -J- from Montgomery. It is near the center of that part of the 

 South commonly spoken of as the " black belt," because the negro 

 inhabitants there greatly outnumber the whites. The town is one 

 of the oldest in the South. It is said, in fact, that when De Soto 

 made his famous journey across that part of the newly discovered 

 continent he found an Indian village of the same name on the site 

 of the present town. Tuskegee is five miles from the main line 

 of the Southern Kailroad, with which it is connected at Chehaw by 

 means of a narrow-gauge road. 



Tuskegee, as the word is oftenest used now, means the Normal 

 and Industrial Institute, situated a mile out from the town and 

 forming a little settlement in itself. This is the great school for 

 young negro men and women which Booker T. Washington has 

 built up, and of which he is the principal. The pupils who attend 

 number a thousand each year. It is the largest school for colored 

 people, managed by colored people, in the United States. There 

 is no one connected with the school, except some of the members 

 of the board of trustees, who is not of the race which the institute 

 is designed to help. 



Tuskegee Institute is so entirely the result of Booker T. Wash- 

 ington's labors, and his life has been so interwoven with the devel- 

 opment of the school, that a brief account of his boyhood and youth 

 is almost indispensable to a complete description of the institute, 

 particularly as the conditions with which he struggled were so gen- 

 erally those which confronted all of the negroes at that time. 



Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Virginia, not long 

 before the breaking out of the war. It seems strange that a man 

 who is so widely known to-day and is so universally respected as Mr. 

 Washington, when asked how old he is should be obliged to reply 

 that he does not know, yet such is the case. The birth of one more 

 black babies on a large plantation at that time was a matter of too 



