Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/736

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

annoyance to other patients in the ward—always a great danger in itself and sometimes fatal to the patients—is added to the danger of communicating tuberculosis. They should be isolated. A number of instances are cited of special hospitals for consumptives maintained by private enterprise, to show that patients can be cared for economically at such institutions, and with a success according to the stage of the disease when they are taken there. At St. Joseph Hospital, New York, fifteen hundred far-gone cases are cared for annually at an average cost of fifty cents a day. At Saranac Lake, where incipient cases are taken, from thirty to thirty-five per cent are cured with an average stay of eleven months and ten days; at Liberty fifty per cent are improved after three months, and about twenty-five per cent are cured. At Sharon Sanitarium, near Boston, twenty-five per cent of "arrested cases" are reported. Other sanitary advantages of inestimable value to the community are mentioned as likely to accrue from the establishment of such sanitariums and their proper management. Patients will, for instance, receive there a proper sanitary education, and be drilled in sanitary practice, taking which to their homes, they will become educational factors in public hygiene. Dr. Knopf proposes to have these sanitariums controlled and maintained by States and municipalities. It would be well to have the infection of corruption removed from State and municipal politics before this is done.

Crater-Lake, Oregon.—Crater lakes are defined by Mr. J. S. Diller as lakes that occupy the craters of volcanoes, or-pits of volcanic origin. They are most abundant in Italy and Central America, regions in which volcanoes are still active; and they occur also in France, Germany, India, the Sandwich Islands, and other parts of the world where volcanic phenomena have been important in geological history. Only one is known in the United States, and that is in southern Oregon, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It is interesting to the geologist and inviting to the tourist and health-seeker. It is as yet reached only by private conveyance over about eighty miles of mountain roads from Ashland, Medford, or Gold Hill, on the railroad. The lake, which appears to be about the height of Mount Washington above the sea, is surrounded by a series of unbroken cliffs ranging from 6,759 to 8,228 feet in height, or from more than five hundred to nearly two thousand feet above it, which are clearly reflected in its deep-blue waters. The outer slope of this rim is gentle, while the inner slope is abrupt and full of cliffs. The rim crest is generally passable, so that a pedestrian may follow it continuously round the lake—a circuit of about twenty miles—with the exception of short intervals on the southern side. The inner slope of the rim, though precipitous, is not a continuous cliff, but is made up of many cliffs, whose horizontal extent is generally much greater than the vertical. Other elements of the inner slope are forests and talus, and these make it possible at a few points to approach the lake, not with great ease, but, if done carefully, with little danger. On arriving at the water's edge, the observer is struck with the fact that there is no beach. The steep slopes above the surface of the lake continue beneath its waters to great depths. "Here and there upon the shore, where a rill descends from a melting snow bank near the crest, a small delta deposit makes a little shallow, turning the deep blue water to pale green." Among the most salient features of the lake are Wizard Island and the Phantom Ship. Wizard Island embraces an extremely rough lava field and a cinder cone, from the base of which the lava has been erupted. The cinder cone is a perfect little volcano with steep, symmetrical slope, eight hundred and forty-five feet high, and surmounted by a crater eighty feet deep, and is so new and fresh that it is scarcely forested, and shows no trace of weathering. The Phantom Ship is a craggy little islet with features that suggest the name. "Aside from its attractive scenic features, Crater Lake affords one of the most interesting and instructive fields for the study of volcanic geology to be found anywhere in the world. Considered in all its aspects, it ranks with the Grand Canon of the Colorado, the Yosemite Valley, and the Falls of Niagara."

The Enchanted Mesa.—An article in a recent copy of the National Geographic Magazine, by F. W. Hodge, gives an account of some interesting exploratory work done by