o carefully
closed the inlet or house-side of the traps.

I found that a warm flue caused the back-vent pipe to evaporate enough
of the water from the seal of the trap to break it in less than a
week, and I am confident that this often happens in practice.

How short-sighted and foolish is it to endeavor to throw discredit on
these experiments which were made with the greatest care and honesty
and which were witnessed and subscribed to by impartial experts, and
to argue that, because other experiments made under different
conditions showed a somewhat slower rate of evaporation, therefore
cases could never occur in which the more rapid rate might be
encountered in practice.

It is likely that the public will very soon awake to a sense of the
importance of investigating this matter for themselves. Their Boards
of Health will then find that with a very small outlay they can obtain
the truth; and that a vast amount of unnecessary complication and
expense can be saved in plumbing and, at the same time greater
security be obtained.

When we consider, too, the well-known unreliability of the vent-pipe
in other ways and the frequency with which it is found totally closed
by grease, it becomes something more than folly to recommend the
public to place implicit reliance upon it.

J. P. PUTNAM.

[Illustration: NOTES AND CLIPPINGS]

THE DIVINING-ROD.--Professor Ray Lankester, having recently expressed
some doubts of the alleged powers of a boy "water-finder." Dr.
McClure, who is chairman of the company by whom the boy is employed,
has denied emphatically that the boy, whose name is Rodwell, is an
impostor. He says that the lad, when tested, never failed to find
either water or mineral veins, the lodes having always been found
exactly at the places indicated. The divining-rod which he holds only
moves in obedience to the muscular contraction of his hands, and a rod
of any kind of wood, or even of any material substance whatever, can
be used, provided it be a conductor of electricity. Dr. McClure's
statements have excited considerable comment in England. The phenomena
of tests by the divining-rod are not by any means new. They have never
been described from a scientific point-of-view, nor has any
philosophical explanation of them ever been advanced, but there is no
question whatever of their existence, and of their being now regarded
by the most advanced scientists as beyond the region of chicanery and
imposture