unless they are very thirsty and drink some of the liquid as they swim through it a matter easily controlled.

Having established the success of this arsenical dip, the Government went to work to convert the States in which the tick is found to a plan for fighting it and eventually chase it clear off the map of the United States.

At this time California was quarantined from almost one end of the State to the other. They couldn't ship their cattle out of the State excepting to some point below the quarantine line, like Texas, and that didn't help them very much. So being progressives out there, they accepted the Government's offer of help and went to work on a state-wide campaign of tick eradication. By means of changing pastures and extreme care in admitting outside stock, they drove the pestiferous insect before them beginning up in the northern end of the State and working slowly and cautiously down the coast till today, for all practical purposes, the tick is as extinct in the State as the Dodo.

Then as the tick existed in the Republic of Mexico, where such things as a little tick doesn't bother the inhabitants very greatly, it was found that unless steps were taken to keep out the drifting cattle from Old Mexico, which grazed on the ranges along the international boundary line, the California work would all be for naught.

So they built the fence and it has served its purpose well, for the stockmen along there, realizing its value, see to it that it is kept in order and though now and then some prowling smuggler strikes it in the dark and cuts his way through it, the damage is soon repaired.

Government experts estimate that the loss to the South through the tick costs the country annually from forty to two hundred million dollars. This loss is in various ways: first, the injury to the animals themselves. No animal, wearing such decorations on his hide as is shown in the pictures of the ticks taken from life, can expect to grow as it should or ever become fit for the butcher's block.

Careful tests have been made with tick-infested steers and with those free from them, with the result that an animal cleaned of all ticks increased in weight two hundred and eighty-five pounds in two months, or an average net gain of about one hundred and fifty pounds per month. The same class of steer, covered with his usual coating of ticks and maintained upon the same feed, stood still in weight.

In the year 1906, this work of tick eradication was taken in hand by the Federal Government under a sort of cooperative agreement with the various interested States. At that time there were fifteen States under quarantine with over fifteen million cattle in them, covering a total of 929 counties with an area of 741,000 square miles.

In 1911, a total of one hundred and twenty-seven counties had been cleaned up and were free from all infestation with almost as many more in process of cleansing. The cost is estimated roughly at about $10 per square mile and the total expenditure by the Federal Government has been to date a little over a million dollars, while the various interested States have spent not over one-half that amount.

But if the yearly loss is taken at the lowest estimate of forty million, the gain in cattle values in those counties already cleaned will more than repay the cost in a few years.

It is estimated by the federal men in charge of the work that it will cost probably six and eight million dollars to rid the entire country of the ticks and with very little watching on the part of the local state authorities they will never again obtain another foothold.

Thus it is that this tick question comes right home to every meat eater in the United States. There are today approximately fifteen million cattle in those States that are under the ban of the tick and if we may add two hundred pounds weight to every beef animal in these infested States, we have secured a very material increase in the supply of food for the nation's consumption.

HE Federal Government has been at work the past season making material for pearl buttons by inoculating Mississippi River fish with infant clams. It is an odd business, but a successful and promising one.

Most of the pearl buttons of the world are made from the shells of fresh-water mussels. Such enormous quantities of these mussels have been fished out of the Mississippi River the last ten years, in order to satisfy the demands of the button factories, that the beds are almost depleted. The Government is now endeavoring to create a new supply by artificial propagation. The steamer Curlew was an important agent in the work the past season. All summer and fall it plied the Mississippi between Muscatine and La Crosse planting clams. As a result, there are now, in the upper river, 85,000,000 more clams-or the material for some half billion buttons-than there were last spring.

The steamer is in charge of an expert from the United States Bureau of Fish

eries. It is fitted up with eight iron. tanks, each of which is four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet deep. Fresh water is kept running in these tanks constantly and extra oxygen is supplied by a compressed-air pump.

It is the nature of the fresh-water mussel in the second stage of its existence-that is, after it has left the spawn sack in the gills of the parent clam-to live for a period as a parasite on fish before it drops to the river bed a full fledged clam. It is this peculiarity of mussel nature that the Government is taking advantage of in its work of replenishing the depleted clam beds.

The crew of the Curlew catch fish with seines in the sloughs and bring them aboard and place them in the tanks. Female clams are then secured, their shells opened, and the spawn, several thousand in number lying in a sack a couple of inches long in the gills of the parent, are removed. The glochidia, as the tiny creatures are called, are thrown into the tanks with the fish. Their valves remain open for five or six minutes. As the fish

breathe in the water, the glochidia are drawn to the gills. No sooner do they touch the flesh of the fish than they shut up "like a clam" and hold on tight. Some times two or three thousand in the space of a few minutes will fasten upon a single fish. No sooner do they get hold than they burrow into the flesh of the gills, there to make their home for eight days to six weeks, according to the variety and the time of the year, before they drop off as fully developed bivalves. The inoculated fish are taken out of

the tanks and then thrown into the river.

Other fish and other spawn take their place in the tanks, and the work proceeds so rapidly that hundreds of thousands of the clams are placed in the river in a single day. Sunfish are found to be the best fish for inoculation purposes, though all varieties excepting gar can be used. As different species of mussels spawn at different seasons, the work of propagating and planting can be carried on for a considerable part of the year.

THE problem of posting people waiting

for trains in the new union railroad station in Washington has been solved by a simple piece of apparatus known as the magnaphone.

The instrument is a loud speaking telephone operated much after the style of the ordinary telephone system. Attached to each of the benches in the waiting room is a device resembling a small megaphone. This is a part of the terminal or delivery apparatus and constructed so as to diffuse the sound. In connection with this are coils and magnets similar to those of a telephone receiver. Wires leading from these electrical devices connect with apparatus resembling a telephone transmit

In operating, the man designated to call trains in the station speaks into the transmitter and immediately his voice is heard issuing from each of twenty-four megaphones. Ever since the construction of the station, calling of trains has

been difficult on account of the echo and reverberation in the waiting room. Under the new system, the operator may speak in a quiet conversational tone. This eliminates reverberation almost entirely and makes the calling much more distinct than formerly.

The installation of the system does not do away with the work of any man now employed, but enlarges his sphere of action. Under the new system there have to be just as many employes to

D

URING the immediately forthcoming years every mile of railroad from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, and from Utah to the northwestern cities, will be electrified. It will be possible to ride from Denver through Salt Lake City to San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland by electric line."

The man who made that fervent prediction is Col. D. C. Jackling, President of the new Utah Power and Light Company, which has just suceeded in purchasing almost every hydro-electric power plant in Utah and southern Idaho.

Even among men who are in that great western section and who keep closely informed on the development of its resources, the revelations of the past ninety days are astounding. It is less than three months from the date this is written that

the Utah Light and Power Company completed its stupendous organization; and in the same period the Great Falls Electric Power Company of Montana has secured nearly all the plants in northern Idaho and Montana. Across the Sierras, the Sierra-Pacific Company controls over 400,000 horsepower at Lake Tahoe, and on the Truckee and Washoe Rivers; and another great merger of power plants is under way south of San Francisco.

Great mergers and combinations are no more unusual on the Pacific Coast than in the near West and East; and the comprehensive purpose of the unification of these immense power resources was unsuspected, even by men on the ground, until very recently. Now, the biggest men in those big enterprises publicly announce the purpose.