ware and kitchen vessels. In Germany it has been introduced experimentally into the equipment of soldiers. Its alloy with the rare metal titanium, while still light, is very hard and tough. Could not picks, bayonets, sabers, and mess plates, imposing lighter loads on foot-soldiers, be made of it? The Russian army tried horseshoes of aluminum, and the horses of the Finnish dragoons, on which the experiment was made, are said to have gained perceptibly in speed by it. It has been introduced into machines, to reduce the dead weight a gain of special value for aërial navigation and for cyclers. A canoe entirely of aluminum, hull and machinery, has been launched on the lake of Geneva, and suggests a new resource for the bold explorers of rivers with numerous rapids in Africa and elsewhere. Its application to aërostats is talked of.
The supposition is consistent with past experiences that new wants will arise as the means of satisfying them increase, and that the new metal, without infringing upon the domains of its predecessors, will in some way create the uses for which it will be employed. A salient fact in the history of the aluminum industry is the rigorously scientific character of the progressive steps in the discovery and production of the metal. Nothing has come about by chance, but all is the work of human intelligence.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
| ELISÉE RECLUS AND HIS OPINIONS. |
By Miss HELEN ZIMMERN,
EDITOR OF THE FLORENCE GAZETTE.
IT is strange how sometimes two men distinctly different seem to reside in the same person. Who would believe it at first sight that Elisée Reclus, the eminent geographer, the careful, accurate, and scientific writer, should also be an anarchist of the most pronounced and uncompromising type—the man who actually regards Ravochal, the perpetrator of the outrage last winter at the Café Very at Paris, as a great man who died for his principles without betraying his friends? This great, large-brained enthusiast and kindly human being has unfortunately got this bee in his bonnet, a moral twist, that hinders him from seeing that the wrongs of mankind can not be righted by laws or lawlessness, but are inherent in the very constitution of our globe and of our imperfect organization. In a perfect world, with perfect inhabitants, a perfect society, perfect conditions would follow as a necessary corollary. But when a great man goes astray it is always interesting to try and discern the why and wherefore. It is on this account that in this article we deal rather with Reclus
