increase in the population is maintained the lapse of another generation will find the Japanese voters in the majority. Yet thus far it is pleasant to relate that there has been little race friction among the diverse elements in the Hawaiian population. Hawaii, like that other center of trade and travel, Panama, seems to have found a truly cosmopolitan spirit.

TWO NEW NATIONAL PARKS

The Secretary of the Interior has just announced the creation of two new National parks which have the peculiar distinction of both lying within the territory of the United States and yet being over five thousand miles apart.

The first of these parks, which was created by the proclamation of President Wilson, is on Mount Desert Island, on the coast of Maine, and is the first National park to be established east of the Mississippi River. It bears the appropriate but somewhat difficult name of Sieur de Monts, one of the great French explorers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose splendid adventures have been so entrancingly described by Francis Parkman and whose names will be forever associated with eastern Canada, northern Maine and New York, and the valley of the Mississippi.

This new Mount Desert National Park is situated on one of the most beautiful spots on the Atlantic coast. It includes lakes and mountains in an area of five thousand acres. From the summit of Jordan Mountain in the park the view of island-dotted Penobscot Bay is one never to be forgotten. The only sheet of sea water that is comparable to it for rocky, fir-clad beauty is that in the neighborhood of Stockholm, Sweden, whose summer resort of Saltsjöbaden is well known to Scandinavian tourists. But Saltsjöbaden possesses no mountains like those of Mount Desert. Those who love the sea will give this distinguished new member of the family of National parks a cordial welcome.

The second of these two National parks has just been established by Congressional enactment on the island of Hawaii. Congress thussets apart," says the Secretary of the Interior, "three celebrated Hawaiian volcanoes-Kilauea, Mauna Loa, and Haleakala-and intrusts their protection and development as National spectacles to the Department of the Interior."

Mauna Loa is a mountain over thirteen

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thousand feet high and is capped, like the great peaks of the Alps, with perpetual snow. Yet at its foot are tropical forests. Thus the visitor to this park may see the snow of the polar regions and the ferns and luxuriant plants of the equator almost at one glance.

The architecture of the United States has been justly criticised by European observers. For cathedrals, palaces, sculptured monuments, and perfect landscape gardening we must still turn to the Old World and acknowledge, as we gratefully do, the unsurpassed contributions of Europe, Asia, and Africa in these domains of beauty; but Americans may take a just pride in the fact that their country is the only one in the world in which there has been established by the people a group of National parks in order to preserve some of the greatest scenic beauties and wonders of creation for the people.

HELP FOR PARALYZED
CHILDREN

Of the children who have survived the epidemic of infantile paralysis (or poliomyelitis) which has been striking down thousands in New York City and vicinity, the first few to be attacked are now beginning to be discharged from the hospitals. As the weeks go by, the number of partly paralyzed children who are rid of the disease but not rid of its crippling effects will increase.

Whether these children will continue to improve in the use of their muscles will depend on the after-treatment they receive. If they leave the hospitals with proper braces, they will have a chance, some of them to make great progress, others to find at least measurable relief.

Those small patients who have been in the city hospitals have, of course, had free treatment; but the city has no funds with which to supply braces. The Department of Health gives them the use of cots and other hospital supplies while they are under its care, but is not empowered to use city funds for the purpose of giving supplies to the children after they are discharged; so, unless funds are provided otherwise, hundreds of children will go back to their families without braces, and therefore without the chance they ought to have.

As a consequence the New York City Department of Health, under direction of its Commissioner. Dr. Haven Emerson, has made provision for receiving contributions

for the purchase of braces and other needed appliances for these children. Checks can be made out to Department of Health, City of New York, and should be accompanied with a note stating that the money is sent for the purchase of appliances for the crippled patients, and giving the name and address of the donor. Every such contribution is separately acknowledged by the Department and is put into a separate account.

Few epidemics in civilized countries in modern times have caused such alarm. The percentage of reported cases that have ended fatally has been unusually high. Rigorous quarantine measures ought to be employed by communities exposed to the danger, and by every family in infected areas. Every suspected case should be reported. Business interests that work to suppress knowledge of such cases are public enemies.

Thousands of people, touched by the pathos of the stricken children, have wanted to help. If they have money, they can help by sending contributions for the purchase of appliances to relieve the crippled; and all, whether they have money or not, can help, too, by taking their part in forming and maintaining an intelligent public sentiment in support of those quarantine measures which the highest authorities on the subject recommend.

THE CIVIC orchestRAL SOCIETY

In winter, good music at high prices; in summer, no good music at all—that has been the musical condition of New York City until this year. Now twice a week, as we reported in our last issue, concerts of the best music by an orchestra of the highest quality, under the leadership of a gifted conductor, are given in Madison Square Garden.

A year ago an experiment in this direction was attempted. Miss Martha Maynard made up her mind that the musical desert of New York in summer should be irrigated. Through her efforts five public-spirited women stood behind her with money. An evening newspaper, the "Globe," disinterestedly gave the project publicity, and a few concerts were given. The response was enough to encourage Miss Maynard, but the standards were not high enough to satisfy her. By this time a number of men of means had become interested. Notably among them Mr. Otto H. Kahn entered into the plan with enthusiasm and with the conviction that "the best was none too good."

An orchestra of eighty-six pieces was

formed from the best players in the Philharmonic Society, the New York Symphony Orchestra, and the Metropolitan OperaHouse Orchestra. Mr. Walter Henry Rothwell, a native of England, for years a resident in Vienna, one time Director-General of Music at the Royal Opera of Amsterdam, conductor of opera in America under the Savage régime, and for seven years conductor of the St. Paul, Minnesota, Symphony Orchestra, was secured as conductor of these summer concerts. The great interior of the Madison Square Garden was transformed. For acoustic purposes new walls and ceilings were made by hanging cheesecloth, and wires were strung across below the cheesecloth ceiling.

The music given ranges from the Viennese waltzes of that master of dance music Johannes Strauss, through the compositions of such masters as Wagner and Liszt and Weber and Gluck, to the symphonies of Tschaikowsky, Beethoven, Schubert.

This music, performed by an orchestra unsurpassed in personnel, can be heard for ten cents! Those who occupy the ten-cent seats are perhaps more discriminating in taste than many of the "fifty-centers," for they come from the East Side, where the foreign-born music lovers abound, or from the ranks of music students. And in the fifty-cent seats, as well as elsewhere in the house, can be found business men who in the winter never dreamed of going to a concert. They are discovering a new world. Never before had they visited the land of music. Now they are becoming interested; and when winter comes they will find their way to the orchestral concerts of the long-established organizations, and keep going to them without shame.

The response has been enthusiastic, but not large enough yet to establish the experiment as a fixture. An orchestra of eightysix pieces requires a large attendance, at the present scale of prices, if expenses are to be paid. The underwriters of these concerts await the verdict of the New York City public. The organization behind these concerts has been incorporated under the name of the Civic Orchestral Society. If enough people show unmistakably that they desire the series to be perpetuated, the directors of the Society (William Delavan Baldwin, President; James Byrne, Vice-President; Arthur Farwell, Second Vice-President; Otto H. Kahn, Treasurer; Miss Martha Maynard, Secretary; Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt ; and

Miss Lillian D. Wald) will take the necessary steps to insure the continuance of the con

certs next summer.

A GARDEN OF GERMS

Few people are aware of the great number of activities carried on under the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. Even those frequent visitors to the Museum who have followed the growth of its great collections which has taken place in the past decade are possibly unaware of the fact that, together with the mastodon and the flamingo, the meteorite and the butterfly, the redwood and the stalactite, this great civic institution houses a garden of germs.

This garden of germs, now some five years old, is the only adequate collection of its kind in existence. It is described in a recent number of the Museum Journal by Professor C. E. A. Winslow in the following words:

In one of the tower rooms of the American Museum of Natural History is a strange sort of miniature botanical garden. All that the casual visitor would notice in the large concrete closet which forms the inner sanctum of this unique laboratory would be rows upon rows of test tubes in neatly arranged and classified wooden racks. A somewhat closer inspection would show in each tube a sort of jelly. On the slanting surface of the jelly is what looks like a smear of whitish paste in some tubes, while in others the paste is more abundant and yellowish, and in still others it looks like a wrinkled mass of moist brown paper. The smear or the wrinkled mass in each case is a growth of microbes, millions of them, and the collection is a museum of living bacteria. . . . There are now about seven hundred different strains of living bacteria in the Museum collection, representing practically all known types of this diverse group. bonic plague has alone been excluded on account of accidents which have occurred in other laboratories with this peculiarly deadly germ. Typhoid and diphtheria germs, however, are to be found with those of whooping-cough and cholera, meningitis and leprosy, influenza and pneumonia, and a dozen more of such pathogenic forms. The original strain of tubercle bacillus isolated by Robert Koch is there, with one of the most recently discovered of disease germs isolated by Plotz, and believed by him to be the cause of typhus fever. In the collection, also, are the bacteria which cause plant diseases and those which decompose foods. There are strains of the Bulgarian bacillus which makes buttermilk and the lactic acid bacteria utilized by the tanner. One germ that infects sugarcane came from Louisiana, and another was

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found fixing nitrogen in the soil of a bean-field in the Middle West.

The main purpose of this unique collection is to provide for scientists a permanent standard collection of bacterial types. Before this collection was created, the discoverer of a new microbe had been forced to depend for identification chiefly upon written descriptions.

It has been the policy of the Museum to distribute sub-cultures from the strains of bacteria in its collection as widely as possible to all responsible persons, and in all cases without charge. Disease germs are, of course, carefully guarded, being sent only to laboratories of known standing. Special" teaching sets" are sent to the smaller colleges and normal schools for use in class work. The comments that have been made upon this garden of germs by scientists throughout the country furnish ample testimony as to its value and importance.

Of all of this we are reminded in an excellent monograph by Mr. Edward Howe Forbush recently published by the Board of Agriculture of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If we were a cat, we should not feel very happy over the indictment which Mr. Forbush has drawn up against the Felis domestica. The chief complaint which Mr. Forbush has to make against this familiar and yet unfamiliar denizen of our fireside is that it is a most incorrigible killer of birds, and in support of this charge he marshals a chain of evidence which is apparently irrefutable.

There are few people who realize how many cats there are who do not even claim an elementary allegiance to mankind. It is from this class that the greatest menace to wild life comes. Mr. Forbush says:

Wild or feral house cats that pass their lives mainly in the fields or woods are seen rarely by human eyes, except by those of the hunter or naturalist. Therefore many people who have