Great Foes in Small Things.
[The paragraphs that follow give something of an idea of the menace that some of the very little things of this world offer to the welfare of mankind. The paragraphs are selected from trustworthy sources and doubtless give the facts as closely as they can be gathered.] The water hyacinth, a beautiful marine plant of green leaves and exquisite flowers, which has done such great damage to commerce in Louisiana and Eastern Texas, says the Houston Post, is making its appearance in the ship channel. A few years ago the water hyacinth was brought from Florida to Louisiana as a floral ornament. Last year the government expended $200,000 in an effort to control the pest, and has only partly succeeded. Streams and bayous which once carried big barges of lumber in Louisiana and Eastern Texas have been closed to navigation by the rank vegetation of the hyacinth. The Sabine River above Orange has become filled with the plants, and it is related that these all grew from a few plants carelessly thrown into the river by some housewife when the plants she had in a tub as an ornament became too numerous. In his annual report, Surgeon-General Wyman, chief of the Marine Hospital Service, who has had charge of the government's fight against the plague in San Francisco, ascribes the prevalence of the disease among rats to fleas. Scientists accepted this fact some years ago. Last summer in England, Dr. J. Ashburton Thompson, head of the Public Health Department of New South Wales, after wide experience with the plague in Australia, expressed the positive conclusions not only that there would be no plague in man without plague in rats, but that the plague in rats would be harmless except for the assistance of the flea. There was no communication of the infection from rats direct, he said, but a flea that has bitten a plague-rat, if it bites another animal can give that animal the plague. The indirect way of suppressing the plague is to exterminate the rats. During the last four months of 1907, over 130,000 rats were destroyed in San Francisco. Of 11,391 examined by the Health Department, only 136 were infected with the plague. At the same time, up to November 19, there had been ninety-six cases and sixty deaths from the plague in that city since the outbreak of the disease last May. To prevent the plague from spreading in the Philippines the Health Board seven years ago began offering a bounty for every rat killed. In India a similar campaign is carried on against the animal pests. In the six years following 1900, when the plague threatened Japan, nearly 5,000,000 rats were killed in Tokyo alone, and Japanese scientists urged an international movement to vanquish the disease by exterminating its propagator, the rat. Our own Department of Agriculture last spring joined the campaign against the noxious rodent with the statement that the common brown rat probably costs the American farmer $100,000,000 a year. The average cost of feeding a rat on grain is about fifty cents a year. What rats destroy in eggs, poultry, game, and other birds can not even be estimated. In Denmark, the loss by rats is put at $3,000,000 and in France at $40,000,000 annually. To combat so persistent an enemy of health and property, nothing less than a systematic, scientific plan of warfare throughout the world can be wholly effective.—New York World. In a suburb of North Collinwood, ten miles from Cleveland, Ohio, a fire broke out in the schoolhouse in which were about 325 children between the ages of 6 and 15. Altho the school had been drilled to march out orderly in case of fire, the teachers were not able to prevent a panic which soon resulted in the children piling up in great heaps at each of the two outside doors, and the latest reports are that 167 of the children and two of the teachers were burned to death; there are a number of others in the hospitals and homes of the neighborhood that are not expected to live. The stories of the efforts of the frantic parents and friends in trying to rescue the inmates of the burning building are too heart-rending to repeat. This marks another one of the awful calamities that are marking these days thru which we are passing. A Satanic Invention.—Of course every weapon for the destruction of human life is a Satanic invention; but the one recently invented by young Maxim is preeminently so. It has all the potency of the modern rifle, but is both smokeless and noiseless. Even the inventor is conscience-stricken, and hopes that the government will purchase the invention and keep it a secret. If it were in the hands of criminals, untold evil could be wrought with almost no risk of detection. This is one item of many which faintly indicate what the conflict of Armageddon will be when the slain shall be from one end of the earth to the other. Catholic Missionary Work.
Catholic Missionary Work.—The Superior General of the Paulist Fathers, Geo. M. Searle, states in an appeal which he has sent out that "We have during the past ten years collected over $100,000 for the missionary needs of the United States." None of this is used for the members of the organization. The mission of the Paulist Fathers is to convert men to the Catholic fold, and the uncertain conditions in the Protestant church make good soil for the Catholic propaganda. Astrology.—Sir David Gill, the astronomer, declares that there is not the remotest scientific basis for astrology. He regards all the predictions of astrology as the purest rubbish. Of course, as he declares, "predictions will be fulfilled now and then, if they are made on a sufficiently wide basis, but the charlatans who make the predictions know very well that they are only humbugging the public, and the public is the most gullible creature that it is possible to imagine." The "Weekly News Letter" of the University of California reports "untold damage" from the larvae of the "crane fly," in a district in central California, to the roots of the growing grass and grain, utterly destroying the crop. University experts have been studying the pest, but thus far "there seems to be no remedy." The greatest damage for this year is over. Better things are hoped for in the future. The Republican party will hold its national convention in Chicago, June 16, and the Democrats will hold theirs in Denver on July 7.