58 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. VI., No. 128. 



it}^, are plentiful, and ' sanitary plumbing ' is 

 the unvarying advertisement. Implicit faith 

 in either class is ill advised. The skill of the 

 one and the handicraft of the other may safely 

 be questioned and criticised. The easy con- 

 science of the contractor, no less than the 

 ignorance of the owner, makes poor plumbing- 

 work possible, for much of it is hiclden from 

 sight. Smoothly wiped joints, with brass and 

 plated fixtures, do not alwaj^s insure sound 

 and honest workmanship. The complexity of 

 this plumbing problem in the great cities, with 

 their crowded populations, must be solved 

 through the agency of general legislation, and 

 the authority of inspection must be derived 

 from stringent laws. The state boards of 

 health were organized with this end in view, 

 and their conclusions are influential with the 

 law-making powers. Sanitary science includes 

 so much, and affects all to the degree that men 

 have no monopoly in its results. Mrs. Plun- 

 kett is right in contending that women should 

 master these problems to aid in procuring com- 

 pulsory legislation. Her little tilt at the 

 doctors on the titlepage is very much softened 

 in the final paragraphs of her book. The mil- 

 lennium is not quite at hand ; and as the 

 doctors discovered the causes that brought 

 sanitar}^ science into existence, and have done 

 all that has been done thus far in formulat- 

 ing it, and as they must be the final court of 

 appeal in all questions that arise before sani- 

 tary science is rounded out and complete, the 

 medical profession will probably see several 

 generations before its ' occupation's gone.' 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



The following short account of a tornado at Aden, 

 reported by Commander Merrill Miller, U.S.N., com- 

 manding the U. S. steamship Marion, is interesting 

 from the fact that it is the first violent storm that has 

 visited Aden since the English occupation. On June 

 1 and 2 the weather at Aden was sultry and threat- 

 ening, with moderate easterly breeze and sea. The 

 sailing-directions give no accounts of storms in this 

 locality. On the morning of June 3 the wind was 

 moderate frorti north-west, with heavy and increasing 

 swell from south-east. The sky was dark and threat- 

 ening. At ten A.M., June 3, the wind increased to a 

 gale, with squalls of hurricane force from the north- 

 ward, and rain in torrents, and very heavy seas from 

 southward and eastward. The sea broke over the rail 

 of the English flagship, which was battened down. 

 The barometer fell to 29.60. At three p.m. the ba- 

 rometer began to rise, when the wind shifted to the 

 southward and eastward, and the gale moderated. 

 Heavy rain-squalls continued at intervals all night. 

 The gale was of the nature of a tornado, and ap- 



parently passed up the Gulf of Aden in a westerly 

 direction. Vessels arriving from the Indian Ocean 

 and the Red Sea report having encountered heavy 

 weather. 



— Mr. I. C. Russell's reconnoissance in the north- 

 ern part of the Great-Basin region, where it extends 

 into southern Oregon (U. S. geol. surv., 4 ann. 

 rep.), has furnished him with a quantity of inter- 

 esting facts concerning this little-known part of the 

 wide west. Its rocks are largely volcanic, spread 

 out in great sheets of lavas that once formed a broad, 

 smooth tableland; but in later times it has been, 

 broken by faults, so characteristic of the Great-Basin 

 region, and thus divided into long, narrow blocks, 

 stretching north and south, and tilted by very recent 

 displacements, so as to expose fresh precipitous 

 scarps that have not yet sensibly worn back from 

 the fault-lines. In the Warner valley, for example, 

 the orographic blocks of dark volcanic rock, miles in 

 length, are literally tossed about like the cakes of ice 

 in a crowded floe, their upturned edges forming bold 

 palisades that render the region all but impassable. 

 The faces of the numerous branching fault-cracks 

 present naked precipices without system, that com- 

 bine to make a region of the wildest and roughest 

 description. The depressed areas were occupied, 

 during quaternary time, by numerous lakes of con- 

 siderable size. Some overflowed to rivers that reach 

 the ocean, like the Klamath, that escapes westward 

 through the Cascade Range; others contributed to 

 the supply of the irregular basin of Lake Lahontan, 

 farther south; and some had no overflow, their influx 

 being counterbalanced by evaporation, thus indicat- 

 ing that the precipitation of the time was not exces- 

 sive, and that their waters were saline. At present 

 the waters have retreated from the terraces and 

 benches that mark their former levels, and remain in 

 greatly diminished volume. Some have altogether 

 disappeared, or appear only in the wet season; others 

 are relatively permanent sheets of very saline water, 

 like Summer and Abert Lakes, which may possibly 

 inherit part of their dissolved salts (soda and potash) 

 directly from their larger ancestor; but the most 

 numerous are those which are now essentially fresh, 

 although occupying basins from which the quater- 

 nary lakes had no outlet (these are therefore not to 

 be considered remnants left by the incomplete evap- 

 oration of the quaternary lakes whose basins they 

 occupy, as in that case they should be densely saline). 

 Their freshness is best explained by Gilbert's hypoth- 

 esis that the quaternary lakes have been completely 

 dried up, and their saline contents so well buried 

 under playa-mud, that the waters subsequently accu- 

 mulating in the basins did not take them into solu- 

 tion. Mr. Russell finds no evidence of either local 

 or general glaciation in the region he examined, and 

 thus differs in his conclusions from those reached by 

 LeConte. The report is illustrated by several maps, 

 showing fault- lines, quaternary and existing lakes, 

 by numerous cuts illustrating the peculiar displace- 

 ments so characteristic of the region, and by a sketch 

 of Abert Lake, in which the tilted blocks that form 

 its basin are shown. It is a valuable and most inter- 



