SCIENCE. 
FRIDAY, MAY 23, 1884. 
COMMENT AND CRITICISM. 
Tue popular excitement as to food adultera- 
tions, and the difficulties met in dealing with 
this evil, lead to some queer results. ‘The city 
of New York, with its vast population demand- 
ing supplies of cheap food, takes an extraor- 
dinary position as regards the two common 
articles of butter and milk. Instead of cour- 
ageously undertaking the proper restriction 
and regulation of substitutes, and the preven- 
tion of fraud, the city authorities, through the 
board of health, now supported by the state 
legislature, propose to expel from the city 
markets all imitations of butter, and all 
skimmed milk. Oleomargarine and butterine 
have never competed with fine grades of but- 
ter. But, made in a healthy and clean man- 
ner, the substitutes have formed a legitimate, 
cheap, and palatable substitute for low grades 
of pure butter. Sold for what they are, a cer- 
tain class prefer the imitations to poor butter, 
although genuine; but prohibition is to pre- 
vent this, and force up the prices of low-grade 
butter. Worse yet, is the exclusion of skim- 
milk from the city. One of the most whole- 
some and really valuable food-products, which, 
sold as skim-milk at a low price, would find a 
market almost unlimited, and prove a great 
blessing to the poor, is prohibited, and emptied 
in the gutter whenever found. The science of 
government must sadly need development, so 
long as it is thought necessary to thus cut off 
supplies of cheap and wholesome food from the 
poor of our great cities. 
Every one remembers as one of the famil- 
iar, or perhaps better unfamiliar, sights of his 
school-days, a cabinet, —a closet with glass 
doors, containing a piece of quartz, a shell, a 
leg of a chair, and dust. Some one stirred 
by a love of nature, awakened for a moment 
by an essay at his teachers’ convention, had 
No. 68. —1884. 
been misled into placing the glass-doored case 
in one corner of the schoolroom, and the 
quartz and shell behind the glass. So it had 
stood for a week or month admired, then for 
six months neglected, and finally for years 
despised, during which last period the chair- 
leg had been added to the contents. 
It would seem that this ghost of a cabinet 
haunts the English schools as much as ours. 
Ghosts love half-neglected, half-forgotten cor- 
ners, and are quickly banished by plenty of 
new paint, and a proper use of the broom. 
To put an end to the haunting school-cabinet, 
a remedy is suggested by Rev. Henry H. 
Higgins, who proposes that a loan-museum 
shall be formed for the supply of schools with 
a few specimens at a time in the departments 
which the scholars may be studying. As a 
loan-museum will have, like a_ circulating- 
library, a limit to the time a specimen may 
be retained, there will be no chance for the 
stagnation which now takes place. It is also 
hoped that the museum would be able to 
supply a much better class of specimens than 
the schools could afford. 
Mr. Higgins differs from many advocates of 
object-lessons in thinking that it is better to 
place before scholars first, not the common 
things of their neighborhood which may have 
beauty, but a beauty overlooked because too 
near, but ‘‘ would take the large and beautiful 
exotic shell, Pinna, with its byssus of glossy 
silk, and the fashionable-colored gloves made 
of this material, and, after operating with these, 
would require the class to bring a large cluster 
of common sea-mussels, and would make the 
children find the silk-byssus.’? His idea ap- 
pears to be, that the advantage of a child’s 
being interested in a novel sight is not to be 
thrown away by disappointing him with a toad, 
and then showing him that he does not know 
all about toads. 
