degrees Fahrenheit, and its odor of smouldering turf mingles with the smell of fermenting cabbage barrels, stuffy bedding, steaming wash, tobacco smoke, and some twenty varieties of animal effluvia. There are kittens and pups in the room, if not pigs, à la Connaught; babies in self-drying dresses crawl about the floor; there is cooking and frying going on, and in the evening rain-soaked rustics clamber upon the platform of the large brick stove and try to make themselves comfortable without taking off their socks and underclothing.

The small windows are nailed down, and, to prevent ventilation more effectually, the door is protected by a vestibule, used for the storage of turf and old krout barrels.

In midsummer wash is dried in the open air, but the turf fire of the big stove is kept up, and the windows are still kept down.

That the graduates of such microbe seminaries are enabled by winter excursions to hold their own at the head of the world's physical development class, proves-well, it certainly justifies Dr. Hufeland's remark that, if the human race were given the benefit of half the sanitary care we bestow on our cattle, the sons of Anak would not have become extinct, nor the race of the long-lived patriarchs.

For Russian air-poisons are not limited to the cabins of the rural districts; millions of city dwellers lose by domestic misarrangements what they gain by outdoor sports; the sanitation of military barracks is bad, and that of military transport trains worse. The coaches for the rank and file are mere boxcars, with triple rows of benches, perhaps a stove in the center, but only pails where there ought to be closets; unhoistable windows, doors rarely opened, and a reckless abuse of the smoking privilege. Superheated, nauseous, almost suffocating, the trundling reproduction of the Calcutta Black Hole crosses the wide steppes and interminable stretches of straggling fir woods, and finally rolls into some city of rectangular stone buildings, gilt railings, signal lights and electric radiators piercing the night mist; barbarism and glittering culture in strange contrast.

The prisons are even worse, and Stepniak's revelations have led only to partial reforms; there are penitentiaries, nay, houses of detention, that breed contagious diseases as systematically as the Ghettos where medieval bigots confined Jews and Moors, till raging epidemics proved the solidarity of human interests by attacking the oppressed and oppressors alike.

Russia enjoys the unenviable distinction of being the seed-plot

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of two international plagues: the Grippe and the Rinderpest, the former a product of the northern cities, the other of the more southern steppes, where lack of wood often induces stock farmers to winter-quarter their cattle in dugouts, that hatch lung microbes like the underground stables of our old-time metropolitan horsecar companies.

And the interest of Russian hygiene, even from a non-altruistic point of view, is suggested by the curious fact that both the epidemics named attack foreigners and their cattle often more virulently than their originators. There seems no fairness about that arrangement, but Captain Cook already noticed something of that sort when a delegation of South Sea Islanders danced upon his deck and were induced to visit the cockpit, with the result that most of them were, the next day, on the sick-list, with a complaint resembling an acute inflammation of the lungs. Vitiated-air microbes had fastened upon their unprepared organism, while in that of the sailors' habit had established what pathologists call a "state of tolerance."

Schoolrooms, too, mediate the distribution of disease germs. The Grippe and certain skin diseases have been known to spread from an infected city school to adjoining buildings, and then all over town, and, finally, to neighboring cities.

It would, however, be unfair to ignore the fact that the labors of Russian health bureaus are grievously complicated by the prejudices of the masses and by the prevalence of bribery. In Bombay British inspectors were mobbed for trying to fumigate bubonic plague dens, and a Hindoo's dread of innovation is almost equaled by that of the Muscovite slum-dweller. Russian hoodlums may not oppose sanitation by acts of physical violence, but they will prevaricate like Kansas stimulant peddlers to conceal the malignity or the very existence of contagious disorders. With the assistance of sympathizing neighbors, they will try to hide a measlesstricken youngster, and, as a last expedient, attempt bribery, in reliance on the fact that Russian deputy health inspectors are as poorly paid as their fellow tschinovniks. Financial straits leave the municipal governments little choice in such matters; owing to the progress of forest destruction, failures of crops have become very frequent, and after deducting the appropriations for espionage and improved patterns of manslaughter machinery, there is not much left for other reforms.

The regulations of the land quarantine are almost equally hard to enforce. General Kauffmann, a few years ago, lined the Per

sian border with a sanitary cordon of double picket posts, but could not prevent blockade running till he instructed the sentries to fire slugs at the legs of tresspassers failing to stop at the second challenge.

As a rule the death-rate of the regular army decreases with every mile farther southeast; i. e., becomes remarkably low in the military colonies of the Armenian border, and attains its maximum in the crowded Polish garrison towns.

About the end of the seventies Charles Darwin induced a British scientific society to print several thousand circulars for the purpose of settling certain questions as to the physical characteristics of yellow-fever immunes: Were dark-haired men more exempt than fair-haired ones? Thin, wiry individuals more than heavyweights?

Only a few dozen replies were received; but, with a better chance of success, some philanthropist should try to ascertain the comparative influence of foul air and cold air, as factors of pulmonary diseases. On the Galician border alone thousands of Russian soldiers are kept, the year round, in "camps of observation," fed and clothed like their comrades in city barracks, but sleeping in tents and getting a more than usual share of outdoor exercise. They are not picked men, but drafted from the neighboring garrison towns, and only rarely from the elite regiments. If, nevertheless, the catarrh and consumption rate of such camps were to prove invariably and enormously much lower than that of the well-warmed barracks, should not the secret of life's deadliest foe be considered as thus definitely solved?

The Russian-especially the native-born-military surgeons would, at all events, answer inquiries with the courtesy characterizing savants in all countries of recently emerged culture, whose representatives, as Baker Pasha expressed it, are not apt to neglect an opportunity for demonstrating their citizenship in the commonwealth of science.

The Russian commissariat would seem to have anticipated the German plan of feeding soldiers on less meat and more saccharine substances. Lumps of brown sugar were issued as early as 1892 in quantities exceeding the needs of tea-drinkers; dried fruit is distributed wherever it can be procured at low rates, but vegetable oils, to a large extent, take the place of meat. The farinaceous part of the menu is still what it was in the times of Peter the Great: navy biscuit, or coarse, black rye bread.

On those cheap dietetic terms and less than five cents a day in

coin, about 875,000 regulars are kept in a state of high martial efficiency, inured to extraordinary fatigues, and to almost all climatic hardships of an empire larger than all the States and Territories of our republic taken together.

In Baku, on the shores of the Caspian, it rarely rains, and the heat becomes semi-tropical before the end of April, at a time of the year when the sentries of some garrison towns on Lake Baikal still trudge in narrow trails between shoulder-high walls of snow and have to protect their hands with triple woolen mittens.

In a world realm of that kind, frequently transferred officers, like those of the Roman empire, become cosmopolitan, or at least eclectic, and, after smelling the horrors of a Chinese slum tenement, feel disposed to fraternize with a tribe of Turkestan herders.

"Als Knabe, durch die Berge schweifend,
Entdeckte ich das Paradies,"

-in their campaigns through the wilds of two continents, the inveterate land-grabbers happened to stumble upon the earthly paradise, and grab it, too: The grand natural sanitarium known as the Caucasus, with its forests and aborigines of primeval beauty.

The great mountain range is beginning to get studded with health resorts. There are at least twenty of them near Tiflis, and about a dozen south of Ekaterinograd, in the valley of the Terek. Landscapes painted for stereopticon views in the vicinity of Paetigorsk may one day give America a conception of the Edens lost by forest destruction in the shorelands of the Mediterranean, and specimens of native Circassians ought to be exhibited to illustrate the sanitary influence of outdoor life in a land of forests and mountains.

For those paragons of beauty and vigor are not Caucasians in the ethmological sense, but Turanians, Mongols, in fact, and cousins of the Chinese caricatures of God's earthly image. To complete the object lesson, the exhibitor ought to procure at least a photograph of the opposite type from the Caucasian side of the border. Outdoor life, athletic sports, and the health precepts of his creed have raised the eagle-nosed and eagled-eyed Circassian hunter from Calmuck bestialism to superlative manhood, while indolence, alcohol, and antinaturalism bave degraded the bottle-nosed and blear-eyed, but undoubtedly "Caucasian" Greek prior from the demigod status of his ancestors to something between a Calmuck and a Chacma baboon. Phenomena of that kind can be studied gratis in the Czar's dominion of 7.350.000 square miles, and their

significance does not seem to have been thrown away on such observers as General Skobeleff.

(To be continued.)

RESISTANCE OF LIVING ORGANISMS TO COLD.

The living body, animal or vegetable, does not freeze as easily as inanimate matter. This is even more true of bacilli and of other microscopic organisms than of the higher orders of life. The resistance has been found to reside in the living cell itself, and to be a consequence of the high pressure in which the cell-liquids are maintained. This discovery has been announced by M. d'Arsonval, the French expert in physiological physics, in a paper read before the Paris Academy of Sciences on July 8th last. The following abstract is translated from "La Nature" (July 13th): "It is well known that the inferior organisms can bear a very considerable lowering of temperature without losing their vital properties. Thus, for instance, the yeast organism, when brought into contact with liquid air, does not lose its power of producing saccharine fermentation, although this power is lessened after a certain time. It is the same with disease germs. Thus the pyocyanic

bacillus resists the action of liquid air for a very long time. It is influenced only in its chromogenic powers; that is, it secretes no more coloring matter, and does not regain this property. Organic substances resist the action of cold to an unequal degree. Osmotic pressure in the interior of the cells is the cause of this resistance, and it is larger as the cells are smaller. This tension may attain several hundred atmospheres. Under the influence of pressure water can remain liquid at a very low temperature. Consequently, if we can diminish the osmotic pressure in the interior of the cells, these ought, at a given moment, to burst by reason of the freezing of their liquid. To reduce this tension they may be plunged into a liquid that is not 'isotonic'; for instance, in the case of beeryeast, a ten-per-cent. solution of salt. Yeast thus treated preserves its vitality, but if subjected to the action of great cold it then loses its power of producing fermentation." In another report of M. d'Arsonval's paper, given in "Cosmos," it is stated that "the liquid in a living cell is in the same physical condition as the water contained under high pressure in steel blocks in the experiment of Mousson and Amagat. It is not astonishing, under these circumstances, that it cannot freeze."-"The Literary Digest."