THE INCARNATION OF MAN.

PEOPLE of a materialistic frame of mind, to whom man is but a machine, physiology but a higher kind of chemistry, and psychology but the physiology of nervous tissue a subject subtile only because the tissue is unstable are apt to put on one side all that cannot be weighed and measured as not only inexplicable, or, as some would say, unthinkable, but as quite beyond the range of reasonable discussion. It is a simple conception of the universe, and to many it appears to be satisfying. Let us, however, recommend such materialists, when they want a change of scene, to attend a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research. There they will find people, quite as convinced as they are of their own sanity, and quite as content as they can possibly be with the correctness of their own interpretation of things, asserting the most astounding propositions, without turning a hair. To those who are so self-centered as to think that there is something cranky about all who do not see as they do, it is a wholesome awakening to find good solid comfortable and respectable people believing in telepathy as a thing indisputable, and holding that man, as we see him engaged in his various more or less ignoble pursuits, in the city and elsewhere, is but the incarnation of one little bit of himself as he exists in an untangible and ethereal form. At the last meeting of the Psychical Research Society, Dr. Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., said that he did not hold that the whole of any one of us was incarnated in their terrestial bodies; certainly not in childhood; more, but perhaps not so very much more, in adult life. What was manifested was only a definite portion of a much larger whole. What the rest was doing during the years spent here he did not know. Perhaps it was asleep, but probably, he said, it was not entirely asleep with men of genius, nor perhaps was it all completely inactive with people called mediums. Now to the modern materialist all this is absolute "rot." Yet Dr. Lodge is not exactly a man to pooh

pooh. Indeed, may not the immaterialists retort that this is a Christian country and that our very religion teaches us not to weigh and measure too exactly? Again, Roentgen, Tesla, and Marconi have of late been giving many shocks to old ideas. At any rate, this is clear, that we must not too rigidly put outside the bounds of sanity belief in the unthinkable. It is a queer world, and which half of it is sane appears still undecided.

LIFE SPENDING.

NEVER put off until to-morrow what can be done to-day, says Public Policy, is the strenuous proverb of life in action. Never do to-day what can be as well done to-morrow, is the restful proverb of life in repose. Life failures are due to a defective sense of values. Objects that appear all-important to youth have no attractions for age. First comes preparation for getting a living, then the vocation by means of which a living is obtained, and at the end a realization of the fact that the life has been spent without any proper development of the art of living well.

If one has any faith in the immortality of his life he cannot escape conviction for the crime of extinguishing the immortal spark if he devotes his days to the acquisition of only that which can have no existence for him beyond the endurance of the life of the body. To us the most pitiable thing in human existence is the exhibition made by strong, resourceful, masterful men, devoting themselves so completely to the gathering of wealth they have no knowledge of any other purpose in life, no ability to appreciate any work that has no money-making terminal, no conception of a life in which money considerations have no meaning or value beyond the mere giving of support to life, or supplying the means of doing work for the good of others. The souls of such men are strangled to death by the hidebound narrowness of their self-imposed

limitations. They know how to make money and they know nothing else. When their money-making days end their life is ended. There is nothing in them fitted for a continued existence.

The days of all men are numbered. This all men know. The exact number of his days no man knows. Such knowledge is wisely concealed. This uncertainty intensifies but it does not render unsolvable the problem of life. Each day is the creation of a new opportunity. From opportunity responsibility and duty are born. The problem of life is solved by doing to-day, in the best manner of which one is capable, all one is capable of doing. This done, the day can pass without regret or anxiety. The justice of God can but approve its record. So doing, success is added to success, as day is added to day, until the whole allotted number have been lived and the soul passes to the realm of dayless existence.

It is not possible to all men to acquire great wealth, but all things that make for eternal life are as free and universal as air and sunlight. They are not products of the earth, like wealth, but products of brain and heart, the spirit, to which they give birth and life. It is said "nature abhors a vacuum." So does the mind. If not occupied by pure, uplifting, ennobling thoughts, it will be occupied by thoughts of a lower order. When men have a correct sense of values they will be more eager to develop right mind living than comfortable body living. Instead of spending all of their time and energies in money-making, or in the gratification of bodily senses, they will regard such vocations as limitations on the more valued occupations and enjoyments of the mind. Instead of waiting for some rounded-out period of sixty years, or the acquisition of so many thousands or millions of dollars before they can retire from business life, they will devote some part of every day to the occupations and enjoyments of a mind life in which their business life, so-called, will have no part. As life progresses, if material success attend them, they will increase by hardly perceptible de

grees the time devoted to the higher life and relinquish the pursuits that have only a physical purpose and meaning. In this manner the grand transformation will be consummated. The mind will not be conscious of the shock of change when physical strength fails and physical pursuits or purposes can be followed no more. For it there will be no change in existence, only a change of cloths made desirable by a change of conditions.

Eternal life exists in perpetual youth. To it age must ever be unknown. So the mind that develops occupations and enjoyments upon which physical life can set no limit. lives always in the ardor and enthusiasm of unchanging youth. Such occupations and enjoyments are possible to everyone, but in largest measure to those who have the greatest abundance with which to do.

In terms of physical life, life-spending must be devoted to satisfying nature's law of physical necessity. To this there is a physical limit. In terms of soul life, lifespending must be devoted to satisfying nature's law of spiritual necessity. Doing good and being good. To this there is no spiritual limit. By doing good and being good the soul breathes and is vitalized by the life of the eternal. Doing good begets the joy of having done good. This is the occupation and satisfaction of heaven. From such occupation and enjoyment there is never a call for retirement. In such occupation and enjoyment every life may partake to-day, and every "to-day" as the scroll of days is unrolled in never-ending succession.

Eternity has no past, no future; it exists. always in the ever-living present. It is correctly spelled now. "Past" and "future" are but terms created to aid the imagination of finite minds. Man enters into eternity at birth. He cannot pass out of it except by annihilation.

The kingdom of heaven is an eternal state into which man can be born only by becoming employed by its occupations and enjoying its satisfactions. For this each day brings opportunity to every person. Let him spend that day of life for the satisfac

tion of his physical wants so far as he must, he will still have abundant opportunity in which to do good.and be good. To the extent to which he is the equal of such opportunity will he feel the inspirations and joys of heaven within himself. To that extent will he establish the kingdom of heaven among men.

THE COLOR OF WATER.

RECENT investigations of natural color in water show that it is due to two distinct causes, vegetable stain and suspended matter. When the latter is present in appreciable quantities it causes turbidity and is not a real pigment. The true color or vegetable stain is greenish-yellow to reddish brown, and is due to decayed plant-growth; the suspended matter is generally mineral and often contains iron. The color acquired by water at the bottom of a deep pond is largely due to this cause.

Experts have adopted a method of stating the depth of color in water by comparison with a mixture of platinum and cobalt, the color produced by one part of platinum to one million parts of water being taken as the unit.

Thus it has been shown that the color of surface water depends both on the character of the neighboring vegetation and on the time that the water remains in con

tact with it. Water near steep rocks, where there are few trees, will generally be below twenty units in color; steep wooded or cultivated slopes give twenty to fifty units; similar, but gentler slopes, from five to one hundred; and swampy areas, one hundred to five hundred, or even higher. Highly colored waters are more common in the Northern States than in the South. Colored water is gradually bleached by sunlight, the action taking place chiefly within one foot of the surface. The study of color in water is of commercial importance, because most people object to drinking brownish water. Hence, in a town water supply the color must either be removed or its formation must be prevented. The latter is often the most economical thing to do, and it may be accomplished by intercepting the water from the uplands and leading it into streams without letting it pass through the swamps.

Filtering through sand will not remove the color from water, and even clay will take it out but partially. Generally, the water must be altered chemically, as by mixture with sulphate of aluminum, which coagulates the coloring matter. The color may also be removed by oxidation, as with permanganate of potash, or by ozone; but this method is not much in use at present. The question is largely one of aesthetics, as natural coloring matter in water is rarely harmful.-Arthur E. Bostwick, in May

Success.

THE air and the newspapers are full of wailing over the exorbitant price—not necessarily cost of beef. The very name "Trust" is coming to have a sinister if not even criminal meaning. The alarmists are too impatient. Time cures all these artificial, unnatural and arbitrary efforts to corner trade and coin unearned millions. Res non diu male administrari. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Every age has its sprinkling of the overambitious and overgreedy who conceitedly fling themselves in the face of Fate by attempting to ignore and override some of the laws of universal polity, universal usage and universal honesty. The commercial delusion they most affect is "Monopoly." The one just now in the foreground is the alleged "Beef Trust." Several of the Quixotian daily papers have for a month or two been trying to curry popular favor-stroking the cat's fur the right way-by valiantly charging this most recent and most bumptious impersonation of the genus windmill.

If these chivalric and doughty heroes of the quill, who all the while keep an eye to business and the main chance, would look up the economic encyclopedia, and refresh their memories as to the histories of all similar movements or efforts in the past, since time began, or at least since man first walked the earth as a biped instead of climbing trees as a quadrumana, they would discover that in all the ages individuals of the genus have tried to get up in the world by climbing on the shoulders of their neighbors, or on the heads of the community about them. There is nothing new in the matter at all. The practice is an heirloom

from antiquity. Cain was one of its early champions.

But it is of no use. There is not an instance on record of a success in this direction that was other than transitory. Pharaoh was swamped, Herod went headlong, and Alexander the Great collapsed like a card house in a high wind. Julius Cesar, Charles the Third and John Law, the great Credit Mobilier, which was going to engulf the country, the Tweed Machine and Tammany-there are no exceptions. Every Napoleon of the whole scheming ilk has met his Waterloo. No combination, trust or attempted monopoly that has ever undertaken to arbitrarily raise the price of the products of the earth, whether of field, farm, mine or mill, above a legitimate. valuation based on a relation between supply and demand, has ever succeeded or ever will succeed. The temporary overriding of an organic law is, of course, possible; but, however dimly apparent, the inevitable checks exist and soon unerringly assert themselves. All these efforts are unnatural because they are unjust, and all nature is eternally pitted against injustice. They are superfetations, and all abort. Monstrosities never go to full term, simply because they have no normal period or place in the order of creation.

"The growth of combinations of capital and labor is an even-handed development. This growth will continue and take the direction indicated, by the force it will gather from individual benefits conferred. The instant a business or a labor organization demonstrates its inability to confer individual benefits upon its members it will begin

to dissolve. Its dissolution will be slow or rapid, as its failure to serve the purpose of its members to gain individual benefits through its instrumentality develops from a suspicion to a certainty.

The science of organization is becoming daily of increasing importance. How to preserve and develop every advantage, and at the same time avoid every disadvantage is the vital problem. Organizations, whether of capital or labor, must be founded on principle and guided by experience, honesty and ability, or disaster will end their careers."-Public Policy.

"The restriction of trade, the increasing of prices, the throttling of competition, is a trinity that will wreck any proposition.” -CHAS M. SCHWAB.

"Far, far beyond our ken, the eternal laws must hold their sway."-HENRY GEORGE.

This "Beef Trust," so-called, is no exception. It is already in the throes of dissolution. There will have to be a new race and a new dispensation of economic laws before any such conspiracy can be made to win.

In this case what are the visible checks? Ignoring legislative interdiction, which seems to be moving in the right direction, there are,

1. Decreased consumption.

I.

Most of us eat too much meat. This is a good time to find this out. People will buy more sparingly if they have to pay twentyeight cents a pound for steaks and chops.

2. Dietetically speaking the meat is not worth the price. The necessary proteids and calories can be had at less cost in bread and beans, eggs and milk, cheese, corn and codfish, peas, pears, peaches and prunes.

Gluten is more nutritious than gelatin; cotton-seed, peanut and olive oils are wholesome and economic substitutes for lard and suet, and even bran excels beef-stew in building material and supporting power for the human body. Let the barons of the "Beef Trust" store away their beef and mutton in cold rooms, or eat it themselves and die of gout or apoplexy; or let them embalm it and send it to the South African

Boers. They will tire of paying storage expenses and transportation, and in any event will soon be ready for embalmment themselves.

Of course, certain people who gormandize on flesh three times a day will continue to worship at the shrine of the fleshpots of Egypt and-Texas; and there is no lack of dietetic pundits who will continue to pile up plausible arguments backed up by the results of laboratory farces, concerning the necessity for a large proportion of flesh in the diet. But the number of those who clearly realize that all human nutriment of whatever character is originally, and always must be practically derived from the plant world, and that in animal food they are accepting it at second hand,—is daily increasing. The more the subject is studied the stronger comes the conviction that flesh is not an absolute essential of a perfect system of diet, notwithstanding the stereotyped assertions of the authorities. It will ultimately and ere long be conceded that flesh is in reality a degenerate form of food, that is, it is one step on its way back to nature. The plant does all the transforming and refining of inorganic material.

PURE FOOD AND POLITICS.

READ between the lines, says an editorial in the Medical News, the Hepburn "Pure Food" Bill, now pending in the House of Representatives, is a misnomer. Its title as it now stands should be "a bill entitled an act to enlarge and increase the powers of the Chief Chemist of the Agricultural Department and to give him supervision over the manufactured food and drug products consumed in this country and exported to foreign lands, and to empower him to pass judgment on medical and hygienic questions in so far as they may relate to the food and drugs consumed by the people of the United States."

In this bill the President of the United States is permitted to appoint a certain