itself with guns and dynamite, and the politicians busy with measures that will get them votes, permit this "perennial massacre of the innocents."

There is no reason why the 103 deaths out of each 1,000 in Rutland might not be considerably reduced. Grant that some are born who are not fit to live because of inherent defects. "It leaves untouched the fact that a vast multitude of children of untainted blood and good mental and moral possibilities, as many, perhaps, as 100 in each 1,000 born, die yearly through insufficient food, insufficient good air, and insufficient attention. The plain and simple truth is that they are born needlessly. There are still too many births for our civilization to look after, we are still unfit to be trusted with a rising birth-rate." Until governments can deal more wisely with the children already produced, they would do well to urge less upon parents the production of innocents for the slaughter.

Every child born into the world is entitled to the best food, good air, and a bright and cheerful house, where it can grow to the best advantage, and it should be the business of government to see that every mother is supplied with these things, both for herself and for her child. The institutions of charity founded for this purpose are not successful. They not only lessen parental responsibility, and give the child a mechanical rather than a sympathetic environment, but they encourage births among the class where they are least desirable. At best charity is an imperfect makeshift and cannot solve the great problem.

There are several things which touch the problem directly and, if enforced, would produce a better race. First, reckless parentage should be discouraged. This can be done, Mr. Wells thinks, by making "the parent the debtor to society on account of the child for adequate food, clothing, and care for at least the first twelve or thirteen years of life, and in the event of parental default to invest the local authority with exceptional powers

of recovery in this matter. It would be quite easy to set up a minimum standard of clothing, cleanliness, growth, nutrition and education, and provide, that if that standard was not maintained by a child, or if the child was found to be bruised or maimed without the parents being able to account for these injuries, the child should be at once removed from the parental care, and the parents charged with the cost of a suitable maintenancewhich need not be excessively cheap. If the parents fail in the payments they could be put into celibate labor establishments to work off as much of the debt as they could, and they would not be released until their debt was fully discharged. Legislation of this type would not only secure all and more of the advantages children of the least desirable sort now get from charities and public institutions, but it would certainly invest parentage with a quite unprecedented gravity for the reckless, and it would enormously reduce the number of births of the least desirable sort."

a

The government could establish minimum standard of sanitary conditions in houses and make it illegal for any man to inhabit a house which falls below this standard. A certain size of rooms, necessary ventilating appliances, plenty of light and good air, are things which should be a part of every house. These houses should be kept in good repair and, in no case, should they be crowded. "The minimum permissible tenement for a maximum of two adults and a very young child is one properly ventilated room capable of being heated, with close and easy access to sanitary conveniences, a constant supply of water and easy means of getting warm water. More than one child should mean another room, and it seems only reasonable if we go so far as this, to go further and require a minimum of furniture and equipment, a fire-guard, for instance, and a separate bed or cot for the child. In a civilized community, children should not sleep with adults, and the killing of children

by 'accidental' overlaying should be a punishable offence. If a woman does not wish to be dealt with as a half-hearted murderess she should not behave like one."

It may be objected that these demands are unreasonable, that it would make it impossible for the poor to have children as they could not meet these conditions. Under present conditions it might be impossible but if this standard is right then the government should correct the conditions which make the ideal impossible. It could be corrected by establishing a minimum wage. No man ought to be permitted to labor for a wage which would not allow him to live a wholesome, healthy, and reasonably happy life. The industry which cannot afford to pay such a wage is a positive curse to civilization. Rather than being a source of wealth to the nation it is a disease and a parasite upon the public body." Hence all such industries should be abolished, only such being permitted to exist that can pay a wage large enough to permit a man to rent a tenement in the best condition and large enough for three or four childdren, "to maintain himself and wife and children above the minimum standard of comfort, his insurance against premature and accidental death or temporary economic or physical disablement, some minimum provision for old age and a certain margin for the exercise of his individual freedom."

Men scoff at this as a meager material

istic interpretation of life, and stamp Wells as a pagan. If, however, these scoffers could be placed in the home of the poor man, compelled to live on his wage, bear children and support them under such meager surroundings, he might discover in the doctrine a sublime idealism, with a spiritual dynamic for the redeeming of souls which has not been attached to more pretentious doctrines of salvation. Others scornfully brush Wells aside as a visionist. And so he is, but the curse of the world, is that there are so few who see visions. Men are so concerned with tariff and ship-subsidy bills, with the building of canals, and the regulation of their beer and whiskey, that they never consider the real problem of life, the making of men. It is to the credit of Mr. Wells that he has seen that this is the business of mankind, that all other business should center about this great undertaking, that the business of the man of to-day is to work for the man of to-morrow.

It is objected that Wells is scornful of religion and contemptuous of religious instruction. Here he may be weak. The heart must not be left cheerless and cold. Neither must the body be left hungry, nor the development of the physical sacrificed to the spiritual. In emphasizing the former Wells has done a work neglected by the enthusiasts of religion.

CHAUNCEY J. HAWKINS.
Jamaica Plain, Mass.

IN

'N EARLIER periods of the history of men the more civilized nations were wont to set aside priesthoods whose sphere of activities ranged from commendable and oft-times fruitful interrogations of Nature, to mastery of signs,

omens, horoscopes, and royal dreams. Failure to supply solutions on demand was a capital offence and the criminals. were all too frequently blotted from the things that be.

Fortunately for the men of science of

modern times we have grown more humane and charitable toward the limitations of the human intellect. Hence, for instance, we are not even impatient or querulous under repeated failures of our savants to formulate an adequate hypothesis of the great Ice-Age of Pleistocene times. Why did such an awful catastrophe overwhelm the present proud seats of empire of the great nations of the earth? Is its recurrence probable or imminent? Is it in the womb of Time and the decree of Fate that the ranks of poor humanity are to be scourged and decimated by another glacial deluge? The attitude of the average "man in the street" toward such conjectures is one of serene indifference as yet. His undisturbed equanimity is only rivaled by that of the gods who were wont to recline on the heights of Mount Olympus and doze as they dreamily gazed at the farspreading panorama of "flaming towns, and clanging fights, and sinking ships, and praying hands" that marked the history of suffering mankind. But the attention of an increasing number of thoughtful minds is being directed to this question. Articles recur with striking persistency in papers and magazines speculating upon the probability of a duplication in a time to come of the icy besom of destruction that swept over Europe and America in Pleistocene times, laying 2,000,000 square miles of the one continent and 4,000,000 square miles of the other under an impenetrable shroud of ice and snow. Geologists believe that it is only about 7,000 years since these conditions came to an end, and, if they should prevail again to a like extent, the city of Cincinnati will mark the southernmost edge of the ice-sheet in America but the Southern states will lie in the grasp of an Arctic climate. London and New York, Berlin and St. Petersburg will be no more. The Irish question and other mistakes will be buried forever beneath an icy pall. Sunny France will be a Siberia knowing no summer, and Paris a frozen solitude of snow-filled streets.

It is a curious and well-known fact that in their gropings after Truth the representative minds of buried ages have in many instances anticipated, with a greater or lesser measure of precision, the epochmarking discoveries of later times. Minds differ in receptivity so that while this or that genius may be said to have caught the inspiration of his age, to have absorbed the unspoken ideals and aspirations of the great body of his fellowmen, and given them commanding utterance in music or art or literature, there are still others so delicately attuned to the voice of Nature that they seem to catch the faintest inflection of some cosmic truth. And, if their concept in crystallized form fell upon unheeding ears among their contemporaries, some later age with greater resources and fruits of research at hand has recognized the gleaming filament of Truth in the speculations of the dead philosopher, and extended to his memory the meed of praise. Thus Anaximander 2,500 years before Darwin's time, Goethe, Browning, and others, did all dimly adumbrate upon the now generally recognized theory of evolution. These men saw, as it were "through a glass darkly" but they nevertheless caught a brief inspiration of a great immanent truth which finally crystallized into a grand and broad generalization in the mind of Charles Darwin.

In the field of research under review, then, it would at least seem possible that the halting and interrogative prophecies of a coming glacial devastation, that appear in various quarters from time to time, are, in their last analysis, a cosmic truth apparent to the subconsciousness of investigators and seeking articulate expression and development into tangible, argumentative form. And it is certain that there is no field of endeavor more worthy of the best efforts of the best minds, for a Glacial Period stands out as the most stupendous revolution recorded in the otherwise orderly sequence of events in the procession of geologic ages, and as one preeminently calculated

to entirely subvert the status of nations and civilizations, to blot out a world and recast the affairs of men at a stroke.

There is a high degree of probability that the much sought after solution is one of the very simplest with which the mind of man could be engaged, notwithstanding the many ponderous and elaborate theories adduced by ingenious philosophers in the past. Speaking in this connection Professor Bonney says:* "It is therefore probable that some factor, which is essential for the complete solution of the problem, is as yet undiscovered, or, at any rate, the importance of one which is already known has not been duly recognized." It will develop in the sequel that these are prophetic words, for it would seem that there really is a factor "already known," but whose importance has in the most curious manner been persistently overlooked by all of our glacial philosophers, thereby delaying the solution of a problem fraught with the direst consequences to the family of nations. Tyndall, the great physicist, showed that the prime essentials were a "boiler" and "condenser." In his opinion we needed perhaps more vapor, but we also needed a condenser" so powerful that the precipitation should fall as snow and not as rain. None can take exception to so simple and manifestly adequate epitome of the conditions necessary to the genesis of an Ice Age. Through the labors of this investigator we are launched upon a course leading directly to the solution of the problem. Many trans-Atlantic passengers have had an opportunity of observing the power and efficiency as condensers of the fleets of icebergs floating in the sea. It is evident to the most casual observer that if these formidable armadas were even slightly increased in size or number a marked deterioration in the climate of Europe and America must ensue. It is well known that our present favorable meteorological conditions are only maintained in a delicate equipoise, and any *Ice-Work, p. 260.

disturbance of the nature indicated, would infallibly subject us to another glacial visitation. This is the crucial point and it only remains for us to consider, apart from unnecessary technicalities, how the sources or reservoirs of these masses of ice being discharged into the North Atlantic are and long have been in process of augmentation and are at last, perhaps, in a state of rapid and more pronounced enlargement.

The cessation of the great Ice-Age resulted, it is believed by geologists, from the subsidence of the northern iceburdened lands beneath the sea, so that no important land-nuclei remained for the formation of ice-caps, and no marked accumulation of ice-fields was possible in the Arctic ocean owing to the wide avenue of escape leading into the Atlantic. Since then, however, a gradual reëlevation of these regions has been in progress so that certain lands west of Greenland have now an elevation almost 2,000 feet higher than that at which they formerly stood, as determined by Feilden, Greely and Bessels. Some writers have pointed out that at the present rate of progress "perhaps a few centuries" will suffice to convert Hudson's Bay into salt marsh or dry land. But in a still shorter time, if these secular movements of the earth's crust are persistent, the present avenues of communication west of Greenland between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans will, for all practical purposes of discharge have ceased to exist. The first fruits of this blockade are evident in the formation of the so-called palæocrystic sea, or masses of hoary old ice, which has been unable to escape from the labyrinthine channels of the Parry islands and goes on increasing from year to year. It was the presence of this ice in McClintock channel that baffled so many of the stout-hearted explorers of the Northwest Passage. The net result of these developments will be that sooner or later the entire drainage of the Polar basin will be diverted into the remaining exit between Europe and Greenland—that of

Behring straits being negligible. This is the portentous feature and key to the whole situation. The subsidence beneath the sea of the land areas of the far north, which induced the cessation of the Pleistocene Ice-Age, left an unobstructed highway for the outflowing Polar currents down the American coast, throughout their entire course, their natural "set" being west then as now, owing to the revolution of the earth on its axis. There was thus left a wide expanse of neutral waters between the south-flowing Polar currents and the north-flowing Gulf Stream bathing the shores of western Europe. In the 7,000 or 8,000 years that have since elapsed, however, this beneficent arrangement has been changed for the worse. The Polar currents have crossed the neutral zone and are thrusting their icy burdens athwart the right of way of the Gulf Stream. The inevitable result must be not only a steady lowering of the mean annual temperature of the adjoining regions but what is more important, a steady increase in the amount of snowfall. Thus Tyndall's postulate of a "boiler" and "condenser" is in process of realization through the growing intimacy of contact of these two extremes of heat and cold. It would seem to be a natural corroboration of the correctness of the line of reasoning being followed to find that, according to the disinterested investigations of Whitney, the glaciers of Iceland are rapidly advancing. Another highly sensitive danger-point exists in the vast snowfields of the mountainchains of Norway, whence several glaciers come down almost to sea-level and at least one actually discharges small bergs into a northern fiord. When the enormous glaciers of Iceland commence to litter the sea, but more probably before that culmination, the Scandinavian systems will respond to the increasing snowfall and send forth their ships of ice to join the fleets already assembling on the high seas from other sources, so that we may then consider the last chap

ters in the history of our civilization to have been written. As each new contribution of icebergs arrives from successive quarters in descending scale of latitude the conflagration will proceed apace until the later stages will be marked with a terrible rapidity-a sort of geometrical progression as it were. It is significant that the geological records of the great Ice-Age of the past show a gradual accession of cold during the earlier developments which were followed by a swift consummation at the last.

It will be seen, therefore, that it is not necessary to be versed in the profundities of astronomy, or steeped in geological lore, in order to grasp and appreciate the simple equation of natural factors whence is evolved such tremendous results as attend upon a glacial epoch. It is probably in consequence of the majesty and grandeur of the phenomenon associated therewith, which have been likened by Professor Wright to the stately progression of the celestial movements, that so many elaborate and abstruse and ingenious theories have in turn been erected upon the ruins of their predecessors. The maximum of penetration required, however, is only that sufficient to discern the inevitable sequence of events that must develop from the growing intimacy of the contact between the moist influences of the Gulf Stream and the frigid products of the perennial winter of the Polar regions. Allusion is frequently made in geological works to the fact that the immense ice-sheets of the Spitzbergen are due directly to the influence of the Gulf Stream. That is to say the latter furnishes the aqueous vapor whence is derived the snowfall requisite to feed the glacier systems of the interior. Precisely the same relation is in an advanced stage of development further to the south between the warm Atlantic drift and the snow-fields of Greenland and Iceland, and will soon extend to those of Scandinavia. With the material results of these conjunctions before them perplexity may arise in the minds of some readers