less waste with a daily consumption of two hundred and four gallons per capita. Of course it would scarcely be possible to pump Lake Michigan dry, but it is entirely feasible to drain the city treasury of means to supply the agencies for distributing such an increasingly extravagant quantity.

In New York the problem of water supply has reached colossal proportions. In spite of the recent completion of the Croton reservoir with its capacity of 30,000,000,000 gallons and the Cross river reservoir with a capacity of 9,000,000,000 gallons the population and the per capita consumption are both increasing so rapidly that the present plans calling for the expenditure of $165,000,000 to extend the water system can hardly be carried out in time to prevent a shortage. G. C. Whipple, probably the foremost authority in America on water supply matters, estimates that New York will be consuming more than a billion gallons of water a day in 1925, or enough to make a lake a mile square and five feet deep. The rising generation may live to see all other available sources of supply exhausted and the sewage polluted Hudson drawn upon to supply the growing metropolis.

By that time Manhattan will be an island in a cesspool, for the billion gallons of sewage then poured into the upper bay daily will be sufficient to cover its entire surface to a depth of three inches. Even now there are two grave sources of danger to the public health in the polluted waters of New York harbor: bathing and sewage poisoned oysters and clams.

This problem of water supply is worldwide. It is a pressing one in England where streams are small and population dense. Manchester was obliged to buy a watershed at a cost of $15,000,000 to protect its source of supply. In Germany for the last dozen years filtration of all surface supplies has been enforced by law. In Australia where rainfall is none too abundant reforesting is included in the problem of protecting the supply. Melbourne's watershed of one hundred square miles will only suffice for a population of 750,000 which will be reached in less than ten years.

Although the deadly effects of impure. air are sometimes slower in developing than those of impure water they are none the less certain. Bad air is even more fatal, indeed, than bad water, for many may escape infection from water, but none who lives in cities can escape impure air. It is fully established that the aqueous vapor arising from the breath and from the surface of the body contains a minute proportion of animal refuse which has been proved by actual experiment to be a deadly poison. This poison has also been fully proved to be the great cause of scrofulous and tubercular diseases. Average city air contains one-thousandth of one per cent of this poison. In overcrowded, unventilated cars and buildings the percentage is vastly increased.

Moreover, each adult needs 4,000 cubic feet of air an hour if the carbonic acid content is not to be increased two per cent. above normal, at which point it becomes objectionable. The chances of getting even a small percentage of this amount in a tightly closed car built to accommodate forty persons, but actually containing a hundred, or in a crowded store or office, or still more crowded theater, may be computed by any one of a mathematical turn of mind.

If any delusions ever were entertained about nature being able in some miraculous manner to change the air even in the streets rapidly enough to supply all the inhabitants with the quantity of pure air needed to meet the requirements of health they were effectually dispelled by an elaborate series of experiments conducted by Professor H. Henriet in Paris in 1906. Professor Henriet demonstrated that while the layers of atmosphere in a city are stirred by the winds they are not removed as rapidly as they are polluted.

The proper agent for purifying the air is ozone, a powerful antiseptic, which is found in country air but never in the city. Sea and country air always possesses strong oxydizing properties while the air of cities invariably exerts strong deoxydizing action. This is a sharply defined difference which Professor Henriet concludes very probably contributes to the known inferiority of city dwellers to country dwellers."

Not only do these insidious foes to

leakage, according to official statistics gathered from the gas companies by the United States Commissioner of Labor, often amounts to twenty-five per cent. of the total output, and has been known to be as high as thirty-five per cent. and even forty-five per cent. Water gas contains on an average thirty per cent. of the deadly carbon monoxide. In passing through the earth all traces of odor are filtered out, but none of the poisonous properties are lost. Asphalt pavements being gas proof the enormous leakage escapes through the walls of basements or follows water and other pipes into offices and dwellings. Besides the ever present dangers of poisoning there is the peril of fire. It is estimated that seventy-five per cent. of the unexplained fires in New York are due to this cause.

All in all it may be seen that the prob-lem of finding air to support life is one of the greatest the city is called upon to solve. No one has even suggested a solution except Professor Henriet, who recommends as a substitute for the ozone which cannot be obtained an abundance of sunlight which is known to have strong bactericidal properties. To this end he recommends that obstacles to the circulation of air should be removed by widening streets and decreasing the height of buildings.

It only requires a walk down one of the narrow sunless canyons of New York or Chicago to give zest to the unconscious satire in Professor Henriet's recommendations. As if health and even life itself were not sufficiently menaced by the crowded warrens of the cliff dwellers towering two hundred to three hundred feet into the air on either side of the narrow slits called streets, there are three buildings now being erected in New York which will approximate six hundred feet in height. For the demand for office. rooms grows ever more urgent as the number of persons who want to earn a living in a given area increases. New York's sky line from the Brooklyn bridge. to the Battery in 1907 when contrasted with the same territory in 1876 illustrates in a spectacular way how the struggle for a foothold on a coveted spot in causing the modern city to expand vertically.

The towering buildings put up in a

greedy effort to squeeze the last possible dollar in rents out of the precious ground, introduce another overwhelming problem the solution of which is disregarded with a recklessness beyond belief: How can the city protect itself from destruction by fire?

The President of the New York Board of Fire Underwriters not long ago expressed the conviction that the Metropolis would some day be swept by a conflagration such as those which have devastated Chicago, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco. Chief Croker, of the New York Fire Department, still more recently voiced apprehensions that heavy loss of life from suffocation might occur on the upper floors of some towering sky scraper. It does not take a very large fire to produce smoke in fatal quantities. There are plenty of tinder boxes crammed with combustibles surrounding the so-called "fireproof" buildings, and for that matter the "fireproof" buildings themselves contain enough woodwork, furniture and paper to make a hot fire. In all New York there is just one building in which any restrictions are placed on the quantity of wooden furniture or other combustible office paraphernalia that may be placed in the rooms. The law does not require fire escapes on a "fireproof" building, so the only way of getting out in case of fire is by way of the elevator shafts which are always first to fill with smoke and flame and are the centers from which destruction emanates. It may help to form an idea of the gravity of the fire peril to bear in mind the fact that the average annual fire losses in the United States are more than two hundred million dollars. The value of the property burned is only a part of the vast losses by fire. To this must be added the premiums paid for insurance, which in the forty-four years from 1860 to 1904 aggregated $3,622,406,354. Also there is the item of fire protection. In New York the support of the fire department costs $9,834,000 a year. In 1904 the fire losses were $229,198,050; in 1906 they were $537,860,000, of which San Francisco furnished $350,000,000.

Just six months before that great conflagration the Committee of Twenty of the National Board of Fire Underwrit

N

INETY per cent of the Philippine forests which have a growth computed to be 1,400,000,000 cubic feet, or three times the yearly cut in the United States, is going to waste, and all the while the world is clamoring for the timbers. The ebonies, mahoganies, ironwoods, narra, and all manner of previous woods, that need only modern methods, a maximum of machinery and a minimum of handling to make Monte Cristos of the needed lumbermen are beckoning with their aged arms to the thrifty American to come and make his fortune.

Two important concessions have been.

granted to lumbering concerns by the Philippine Government, viz., the Mindoro Lumber and Logging Company, on the east coast of Mindoro, and the Insular Lumber Company, in the Northern part of the Island of Negros. Both of these companies have a twenty-year license agreement and are doing an enormous and profitable business.

The Mindoro concession includes the forests on a low coastal plain near the Bongabong river, and is on typical agricultural land. This makes the property even more valuable after the timber has been removed. The tract contains about seventy square miles, a great portion of which is being rapidly cleared. The Philippine Forestry Service in making surveys took seven commercial tree spe