of open spaces. The coefficient varies from 104 per 10,000 in the crowded quarters to 11 per 10,000 near the Champs Elysées. That is why the English call the parks "the lungs of London." A park that is large enough is a reservoir of pure air, and the trees that encompass and protect it form a very efficient natural filter in stopping the clouds of dust from the streets and rendering healthy the ambient air. While London has 290 parks or squares, whose total area is 752 hectares (1,859 acres), and Berlin 20 parks of 554 hectares (1,368 acres), Paris has 46 parks of only 263 hectares (649) acres). This is not enough, though active steps are being wisely taken to increase the extent of the parks, and with that end in view it is proposed to reserve the space now covered by the fortifications. The movement in favor of open spaces and for plant growth in the cities is manifest in England and the United States in very extensive work for laborers' gardens and in the creation of public gardens, a work which an association has planned to promote in France.2

URBAN CIRCULATION.

M. E. Hénard, in his Études sur les transportations de Paris, ingeniously distinguishes six kinds of circulation: The household circulation, the professional circulation flowing at the hours of opening and closing of offices and shops, the economic circulation, the fashionable circulation, the holiday circulation, and the popular circulation. You might also add the tourist circulation. These several kinds of circulation present as a whole a series of problems which, according to M. de Foville, constitute "the mechanics of crowds." The encumbering of certain streets goes so far as to obstruct and congest traffic. In Paris, for example, the services rendered by the general transportation companies, exclusive of carriages and long distance railways, but including suburban service

1 Les espaces libres à Paris. Le Musée social. Memoires et documents, July, 1908.

2 G. Benoit-Levy, Les Cités-Jardins. Revue internationale de sociologie, December, 1908. Ch. Gide, Les cités-jardins. Revue économique internationale, October, 1907. H. Baudin, La Maison familiale à bon marché. Geneva, 1904. L'Association des Cités-Jardins de France has for its aim to apply to dwelling places the latest principles of hygiene; to form model industrial centers; to develop city systems of parks, gardens, and playgrounds; to encourage the creation of city gardens. Everywhere, in the factory, in the city, at the fireside, the association seeks to introduce customs of life more healthy and pleasanter. We seek to create model cities or villages in all their parts when that is possible. We seek to develop social institutions which render life more merciful and more efficacious. We seek to develop habits which shall better the physique and morals of our race. We seek to make our centers of city life more hcspitable and healthier. For this purpose we have contributed to the formation of city gardens, to the promotion of social welfare in factories, to the conservation and extension of open spaces in large cities. How one dreams one minute of the effect that would result in a workshop by the addition of windows to allow the air, the light, and the sun to enter throughout the day. How one dreams of the effect it would have on the workmen to place near their work tables some seats adjusted to their shape, where they could be seated without risk of deformity. How one dreams, in another range of ideas, of the results of the conservation of a bunch of shrubbery or trees, or of a park in crowded quarters of the city. The workshop well lighted, the city with great open spaces, would be better able than the sanitariums with their expensive treatment to combat tuberculosis. The Association of City Gardens has created the social service which gratuitously makes all inquiries and gives advice to all who wish to better the conditions of life in our present cities or to build

new ones.

at intervals of about 25 years, are shown by the following figures, corresponding to the number of passengers carried, expressed in millions:

Though the movement of passengers increased in such a strong proportion, this was not only because of increase in population, but also because one becomes more and more in the habit of resorting to a means of transport to save time in reaching a place. "Time is money." In 1846 a Parisian used the existing lines 44 times during the year; in 1875, 78 times; in 1904, 256 times. M. Jenkins showed the British Association that in 1867 each inhabitant of London made an average of only 23 trips on the city lines, whereas the corresponding figure was 55 in 1880, 92 in 1890, 126 in 1900, 129 in 1901. The same author has shown similar averages in New York to have been 47, 118, 182, 283, and 320 for the years 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, and 1900. A few years ago New York had transportation facilities capable of moving only 1,200 millions of passengers, while to-day the capacity is 2,000 millions.

To remedy this condition it is proposed to construct elevated sidewalks or subways at the street crossings. Under various methods. what is being sought is movement at several elevations. In London the subways have two or three tunnels superposed. The metropolitan roads of Paris and Berlin, the elevated roads of New York, and the subways of Boston are an application of this method. On the streets animal traction is being replaced more and more by electric traction for tramways and automobile traction for single vehicles. In Paris from 1897 to 1907 the number of horses decreased from 92,026 to 83,458. City railways are more and more extending their zone of radiation, and in the United States, for example, have already commenced to engage in freight service.

The very high cost of underground railroads and in a less degree of street railways have led to the employment of automobile traction for single vehicles. It was only in 1905 that the autobus appeared in the streets of London. The autobus, though less expensive to establish than street railways, easily replaceable and with route changeable at will, besides much faster than the horse omnibus, yet it is, nevertheless, not free from inconveniences. The cost of management

of autobus service is greater than for electric tramways, and there is the noise, the odor, and the danger from fire and accidents. But the autobus is a new method, therefore susceptible of technical improvements, and has been called to take a place by the side of the street railway in replacing the horse cars, a dearer and slower method.

(d) CITY VITAL STATISTICS.

As a general rule, city population grows faster than the habitable territory, resulting at once in an overcrowding, particularly in the workmen's quarters. Paris has 86,000 dwellings with an average of 30 to 32 persons per house, while in London this average is only from 6 to 7.1 The number of dwellings tends to be exhausted, while the lodgers increase. In 1896 the density of population was 326 persons per hectare (2,471 acres) in Paris, 260 in Berlin, 140 in St. Petersburg, 136 in London, and 85 in Vienna.

Overcrowding is always a sign of poor hygienic conditions. The atmosphere is more vitiated; the townsman lives much more indoors. Likewise the city mortality is greater than mortality in the country. What chiefly affects cities is the proportion of deaths resulting from infectious disease, infant mortality, and stillbirths.

Illegitimate births and suicides are also more frequent among city dwellers; crime is greater, especially crimes against property, resulting from misery and stronger and more numerous temptations.

Through immigration, cities have a greater number of adults, hence a greater frequency of marriages and divorces. This is so in cities that are made up in great part of a foreign element. In Geneva, Bâle, and Zurich foreigners number more than a third of the total population; Paris 75 per thousand, Vienna 22 per thousand, and Berlin 11 per thousand.

Cities are, on the other hand, centers of growth for democratic and socialistic ideas; politics is more advanced. The admixture of the people is an obstacle to the survival of particular languages and dialects. By the force of things, M. P. Meuriot says, cities help to unify the language, as they also contribute to alter it.

Finally, cities form important centers of consumption. Their influence is exerted over the surrounding regions that are given up to market gardening and raising of fruit, to the rearing of cattle for providing milk. Their budgets increase and in order to reduce the fiscal charges of their taxpayers, some cities have municipalized their industrial services, gas, water, electricity, railways.

1 G. Cadoux. La vie des grandes Capitales. Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1908.

THE SINAI PROBLEM.1

By Prof. Dr. E. OBERHUMMER.

[With 3 plates.]

Few unsettled questions in Biblical geography have been so variously answered and aroused such lively discussions as that of the. actual site of Mount Sinai. True, tradition had seemingly long ago solved this problem to its own satisfaction, for since the days of the first Christian anchorites (350 A. D.), whose life in the rock desert of the Sinaitic peninsula George Ebers depicted in such a vivid manner in his "Homo Sum," the crystalline mountain range which fills out the southern part of the peninsula, forming a section of the ArabicNorth African tableland, between the Gulfs of Suez and Akaba, has been considered as the dwelling place of the Israelites after the exodus from Egypt.

Thus the oldest cartographic representation which we have of this region, the "Tabula Teutingeriana," a road map of the Roman Empire, begins with this viewpoint. The remarkable illustration here presented (pl. 1) unmistakably delineates in outline, including the two inlets or bays at the end, the Sinaitic peninsula containing a mountain inscribed Mons Syna, above which appear the words "Hic legem acceperunt in monte syna" (here they received the law on Mount Sinai), and farther above we read "Desertum ubi quadraginta annis erraverunt filii israel ducente Moyse" (the desert where the children of Israel wandered 40 years, led by Moses). These words obviously do not belong to the original draft of the road map, which was based upon Agrippa's map of the Roman Empire in the time of Augustus, but are, like the words "Mons oliveti," near Jerusalem, a Christian addition of the fourth century. But that the localizing of Sinai on the peninsula was then considered established is shown by the oldest pilgrim literature, such as the Pilgrim of Bordeaux (A. D. 333) and the Itinerarium of Silvia.3

2

1 Translated by permission, from Die Sinaifrage. Von Prof. Dr. E. Oberhummer. Mitteilungen der K. K. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien, vol. 54, 1911, Wien, pp. 628-641. 2 A. Elter, Itinerarstudien (Bonn, 1908), p. 10f.

The latter itinerary has been discovered recently in an Italian manuscript and was assigned by the first editors (Gamurrini, Mommsen) to Silvia of Aquitania (about A. D. 390). However, the last researches of R. Meister, Rheinisches Museum 64 (1909), seem to prove that the author was the Abbess Aetheria of Gaul, in the beginning of the sixth century. The best critical edition of these and the other oldest itineraries has been given by P. Geyer, Itinerara Hierosolymitana. Vienna 1898. A reprint of "S. Silviae Peregrinatio" has also been made by E. A. Bechtel, Chicago, 1902.