76 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
duction of light by the incandescence of platinum and of iridium ; and if 
rumour he true-tongued it is an alloy of these metals -which Edison 
employs. No mention, however, is made of Edison’s light ; nor could this 
be expected, as we presume the volume was printed before the scientific 
world had been startled by the mysterious paragraphs which have since 
been circulated on this subject. 
While believing that Mr. Prescott’s volume will be widely useful in 
offering a compact account of many recent electrical inventions, it should 
be mentioned that much of the book is made up of papers published else- 
where by Dolbear, Grey, Page, Du Moncel and other electricians. We 
should not object to this method of book-making if the reprints and 
quotations were always clearly indicated by inverted commas or other 
quotation-marks. Unfortunately, however, such indications are used but 
sparingly, and the reader is therefore often at a loss to know where the 
quotations end, and whether he is reading the editor’s or somebody 
else’s words. There is much convenience as well as honesty in the American 
editor’s maxim — to render unto scissors the things that are scissors’. 
DANGERS TO HEALTH.* 
rt iHIS is an excellent, albeit a very quaint book. It takes its origin in a 
-L lecture on Sanitation, delivered two years ago by Mr. Teale before the 
Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. “ The truth of the matter,” says 
the writer, “ is this, that having discovered and rectified, one by one, 
numerous defects of drainage in my own house, and in property under my 
charge, and having further traced illness among my patients to scandalous 
carelessless and gross dishonesty in drain work, I became indignantly alive 
to the fact that very few houses are safe to live in. Probably no work done 
throughout the kingdom is so badly done as work in houses, drains, and 
pipes, which is out of sight.” 
Now the quaintness and at the same time the force of the book is the way 
its author sets about remedying an acknowledged defect in our social ad- 
ministration. lie does not attempt a treatise which would be read by few 
and understood by fewer. But he takes every form of defect, whether arising 
from ignorance or from dishonesty, and he chalks it up on the wall as a terror 
to evildoers. “ The design,” he says, “ I have set before myself is this, to re- 
present pictorially every important fault to which domestic sanitary arrange- 
ments are liable.” The fifty-four plates thus form a sort of Danse 
Macabre ; a half-humorous series, at which one first smiles, and then 
shudders. Each plate is the body of an occupied house skilfully dissected. 
The baby is in its cot, the maid is in the dairy, the kettle is boiling on the 
kitchen fire, the invalid in her bed, the meat is in the larder, the cotter is 
smoking at his door, the women are gossiping around the common pump. 
But the picture goes below the surface ; the various faulty drains, and inlets 
* “Dangers to Health. A pictorial guide to domestic sanitary defects. 
55 Plates with descriptions by T. Pridgin Teale, M.A., Surgeon to the 
General Infirmary, Leeds. 8vo. Leeds: Charles Goodall. London: 
Churchill. 
