The experts of the Department of Agriculture, working with the professors of the University of Missouri and of the Agricultural College of Texas, discovered that this fever was transmitted solely through the cattle-tick, which carried the germs from sick cattle and implanted them in well cattle when sucking their blood. An economical method of ridding cattle of ticks before shipping, by a process of dipping, removed all danger to Northern cattle from Southern shipments, and the costly quarantine handicap was removed or greatly mitigated.
In the past three years a practical and economical method of entirely exterminating these ticks has been worked out and tested by our scientists, and the ticks have already been exterminated over nearly 64,000 square miles, an area larger than the State of Georgia, and it is only a matter of a few years and wider diffusion of education when the cattle-tick will be entirely exterminated. When we consider that the losses of all kinds from cattle-ticks in the South and Southwest were estimated at $40,000,000 per year, we can see what these scientific discoveries mean for us.—New York Evening Post.
(1004)
EXTRAVAGANCE, CENSURABLE
A newspaper writer gives this picture of an occurrence in New York:
On what proved to be the coldest night of the year, a man, said to represent a brand of wine he is anxious to export, engaged the largest stage in the world from midnight until the next noon and gave an entertainment in honor of an elephant, to which were bidden the men and women whose lights shine mostly on the Great White Way.
These people were requested to come drest as “rubes,” in the hope of making themselves as ridiculous as possible. But that was unnecessary, as the report of their antics while the wine, represented by their host, flowed with increasing freedom, did for them what no amount of caricature in dress could accomplish.
Out in the cold of this same freezing night there is a bread-line. Stationed at various places in this city are municipal free lodging-houses. To these flocked the army of the hungry and homeless, seeking for food and shelter from the bitter cold.
On the one hand, wanton extravagance; on the other, biting poverty. It ought to be the province of Christianity to abolish both of these for their mutual good. (Text.)
(1005)