Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/301

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NOTES.
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sional categories. Candidates for admission must be qualified in Spanish and Latin grammar, geography, Spanish history, the elements of natural history, theoretical mechanics, geometry and its relations to projections and perspective, physics, chemistry, lineal, topographical, and landscape drawing, and French and German. Especial attention is given in the course to topography, chemistry, and mathematics. Branches bearing particularly on forestry are introduced in the second year, and are made more prominent in the succeeding years. The custody of the public forests is vested in the civic guard. The country is divided into forty-six forestral departments, the forests in each of which are under the care of a chief engineer.

Evening Continuation Schools.—In a paper read before the Society of Arts, London, Dr. William Lant Carpenter considered the best means of continuing the education of children who are taken from the day school as early as the law allows and set at work. He said that education to be given in the evening must be such as will attract, interest, and recreate tired children. It has to compete with the social gambolings of the street, or even with the gaudy, specious amusements which too often allure them. In the second place, it must touch and draw forth the opening nature of children of that age, so that their instinctive impulses and growing powers, both of body and mind, shall be rightly nourished and trained. Lastly, it must bear directly upon the practical work of their daily life, upon the pure enjoyments that are possible to them, and upon the noble duties that will devolve on them. In Nottingham a very successful attempt had been made to ingraft upon the instruction required by the Government, exercises of a more practical and recreative character, conducted by voluntary teachers, such as calisthenics, musical drills, drawing, modeling, demonstration in elementary science, geography with special reference to physical phenomena and to commerce, shopping and workshop arithmetic, needlework, historical and other readings illustrated by the lantern. Moreover, seven working men were appointed to be the managers of each school, and these men so labored that during the first year of their service the attendance was doubled. The "Recreative Evening Schools Association" was formed in London in 1886 with a similar purpose, and had accomplished valuable work, both within and outside of the metropolis. Dr. Carpenter said in regard to the use of the lantern that its value as an educational agent is only beginning to be recognized. Eyes wearied with long use during the day can not endure the fatigue of much book-work at night, but they are revived and charmed by the splendor of gay color and brilliance of light. He urged the teaching of science, not only as a preparation for technical education, but still more to put the young people into an intelligent relation with the phenomena of the world in which they live. In order to deal with the distress arising from unthrift, vice, self-indulgence, and reckless and improvident marriage in a great city like London, Dr. Carpenter said: "We must capture the boys and the girls who will be the fathers and mothers of five or ten years hence. If when captured their lives and habits are molded at the impressionable age, from fourteen to twenty-one, so as to become good citizens, and not reckless pleasure-hunters, unaccustomed to resist the impulse of passion or the suggestions of desire, we are, in point of fact, sterilizing the unfitness latent in them, and thus preventing the formation of a new national debt of vice and crime."



NOTES.

Dr. F. P. Wightnick sounds another note of alarm against danger from lead-poisoning from using fruit canned in tin. Three cases have lately come under his observation in which he assigns the cause of trouble to this source. One case is that of a patient who had been using canned tomatoes for three years, and who had for several months suffered painful disorders of digestion. Analysis of the tomatoes revealed the presence of 0·987 grain of oxide of tin and 0·339 grain of chloride of lead per pound of preserved vegetables. The other cases are of a mother and son who have eaten canned tomatoes freely, and are suffering from similar digestive disorders. The evidence of lead-poisoning is not presented in so positive a form as in the other case. Medical men and chemists have usually inclined to the opinion that the danger of poisoning from canned fruits was insignificant.

The "Quarterly Journal of Inebriety" has called attention to the indiscriminate