NOTES. 



719 



June are remarkable for the prevalence of 

 white ; July, August, and September of yel- 

 low; and September and October of purple 

 and blue. 



THE caves of Mount Elgonin, East Africa, 

 extend right round the mountain and occur 

 in the lava as well as in the agglomerate beds. 

 Mr. J. Thomson believes that they are old 

 excavations ; but a correspondent of the Lon- 

 don Times, who visited them in February, 

 1893, has come to the conclusion that they 

 are merely vast blow-holes in the mountain, 

 " which is a grand specimen of an extinct 

 volcano, the crater being some eight miles 

 in diameter and from fifteen hundred to two 

 thousand feet in depth." The mountain is 

 fourteen thousand feet high, with a base of 

 about one hundred and fifty miles in circum- 

 ference. 



THE report of the Massachusetts State 

 Board of Health on the Geographical Distri- 

 bution of Certain Causes of Death in that 

 State presents the results of an inquiry re- 

 specting the relation of paper mills to small- 

 pox mortality. In eleven cities and towns 

 having extremely high ratios of smallpox 

 mortality, six contained one or more paper 

 mills in which rags were used ; and a list of 

 twenty-eight cities and towns in which there 

 are paper mills contains only four places in 

 which there were no smallpox deaths during 

 twenty years, and non-fatal cases are known 

 to have occurred in two of these towns. Fre- 

 quent investigations of the board have 

 shown that smallpox in Massachusetts is 

 very often due to infected rags. In many of 

 these cases it appeared probable that domes- 

 tic rags collected in the large cities of the 

 United States were the source of infection. 



A SETTLEMENT of the silver question is 

 propounded by Mr. Roderick H. Smith, au- 

 thor of several works on business, which he 

 believes will be sovereign and permanent. It 

 is the enactment of a law, of which he sub- 

 mits a draft, the essential feature of which 

 is a provision for the issue by the Govern- 

 ment of certificates against deposits of silver, 

 which shall be redeemable, on demand, in an 

 equal value of silver to the amount of the 

 deposit. Thus, whatever may be the fluctua 

 tions in the value of silver, the certificates 

 can never command more than they are 

 actually worth. 



THE Massachusetts State Board of Health, 

 inquiring into the distribution of cholera in- 

 f antum, finds the disease apparently promoted 

 by the employment of mothers away from 

 home. It also finds that a high mortality 

 rate from cholera infantum occasionally ex- 

 ists in a comparatively small town where 

 there are one or more densely populated 

 manufacturing villages in which the condi- 

 tions of living may resemble those of a large 

 city. Upon this point Dr. Haven says 

 " We may have all, or nearly all, of the most 



icious conditions of city life in a single 

 tenement house in some small town of per- 

 laps only a thousand inhabitants ; we may 

 aave, that is, the heat, the dirt, the over- 

 crowding, the bad drainage, and the artificial 

 feeding which are the concomitants of city 

 life." 



EXPERIMENTS by Grassi, Cattani, Tizzoni, 

 Simmonds, and Sawchenk, made under vari- 

 ous conditions and in great diversity of 

 forms, are confirmatory of one another, and 

 afford cumulative evidence of the compe- 

 tency of flies to convey cholera germs. 

 Sawchenk even suggests that the bacilli may 

 be able, under suitable conditions, to multi- 

 ply within the bodies of flies ; in which case, 

 besides being dangerous carriers of infection, 

 the flies would be a veritable hotbed for the 

 preservation and further multiplication of 

 cholera bacilli. 



A REMARKABLE illustration of the perse- 

 verance shown by roots in seeking food is 

 related in Nature by the Rev. W. H. Oxley, 

 vicar of Peterham. The roots of a wistaria 

 entered the dining-room of Eden House, 

 Ham, by a very small chink in the side of 

 the window near the ceiling. On removing 

 from the walls the paper, which had not been 

 disturbed for many years, the whole of the 

 plaster beneath was found covered with a 

 fine network of roots spreading all round the 

 room. There was no appearance on the pa- 

 per to give rise to any suggestion of the pres- 

 ence of roots being there. Prof. Dyer re- 

 marks that the roots seemed to have behaved 

 more like the mycelium of a fungus than an 

 ordinary axial structure. The room was con- 

 stantly inhabited, with fires. 



THE Italian Minister of Public Instruction, 

 Signor Martini, has called the attention of 

 the Chamber of Deputies to the evils of over- 

 pressure in the public schools, under which 

 the programmes have been enlarged without 

 corresponding enlargement of the cerebral 

 convolutions, and the pupils are " swallowing 

 much and digesting little." "While the 

 able-bodied artisan," he says, " demands the 

 restriction of his labor to eight hours, we 

 exact from our boys of ten a labor at once 

 more prolonged and more severe." The 

 minister has been quick to learn from the 

 lessons given him, and has already instituted 

 reformatory measures. The tasks to be un- 

 dertaken after school hours have been mini- 

 mized, inducements to prolong mental labor 

 beyond the just limits have been diminished, 

 and the overstrain due to excessive competi- 

 tion is discouraged ; the number of subjects 

 to be taken up at once is curtailed, the 

 schools have developed a "modern side," 

 and happy results and improvement are al- 

 ready visible. 



IN a recent " long-distance walk " between 

 Berlin and Vienna some three hundred and 

 sixty miles the winner among fifteen com- 



