Indiana State University - Sycamore Yearbook (Terre Haute, IN)

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THE NORMAL ADVANCE 9 Selections from it My Summer in a Gardent By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mudpies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground tor of looking on while he pays another to dig is as sure to come back to him as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there. To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most sat- isfactory thing a man can do. g: l: at t Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it. It is alike the passion of the parvenu and the pride of the aristocrat. Broad acres are a patent of nobility, and no man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the sur- face, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property. And there is a great pleasure in working in the soil apart from the ownership of it. The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done some thing for the good of the world. He belongs to the producers. It is a pleasure to eat the fruit of ones toil, even if it be nothing more than a head of cabbage or an ear of corn. One culti- vates a lawn even with great satisfaction; for there is nothing more beautiful than grass and turf in our latitude. The tropics may have their delights, but they have not turf, and the world without turf is a dreary desert. The original, Garden of Eden could not have had such turf as one sees in England. The Teutonic races all love turf; they emigrate in the line of its growth. To dig in the mellow soileto dig moderately, for all pleasure should be taken sparinglyaais a great thing. One gets strength out of the ground as often as one really touches it with a hoe. Antaeus tthis is a classical articlel was no doubt an agriculturist; and such a prize fighter as Hercules couldntt do anything with him till he got him to lay down his spade, and quit the soil. It is not simply beets and pota' toes and corn and string-beans that one raises in his well-hoed garden; it is the average of human life. There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and it also, when it is stirred up, goes into the man who stirs it. The hot sun on his back as he bends to his shovel and hoe, 0r contemplatively rakes the warm and fragrant loam, is better than much medi- cine. The buds are coming out on the bushes round about; the blossoms 0f the fruit trees begin to show; the blood is running up the grape vines in streams; you can smell the wild flowers on the near bank; and the birds are fly- ing and glancing and singing everywhere. T0 the open kitchen door comes the busy house- wife to shake a white something and stands a moment to look, quite transfixed by the de- lightful sights and sounds. Hoeing in the garden on-a bright May day7 when you are not obliged to, is nearly equal to the delight of go- ing trouting. Blessed be agriculture, if one does not have too much of it. All literature is fragrant with it, in a gentlemanly way. At the foot of the charming olive-eovered hills of Tivoli, Horace tnot he of Chappaquaa had a sunny farm; it was in sight of Hadrianls villa, who did land- scape gardening on an extensive scale, and probably did not get half as much comfort out

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8 THE NORMAL ADVANCE itYou didnt mean what you said a while ago? Miss Keating made no reply. iiDid you? he insisted. ' gAm I in the habit of saying things I dont meaniw she returned calmly. itNo-o, butel, Mr. Warner stopped. There didn,t seem to be anything else to say. Another Silence. , ttYou are letting me hold your handf, The member in question was promptly with- drawn, and Mr. Warner regretted his rashness. i4Beautiful night;7 he ventured finally. No answer. t2A trifle warm, though?7 Still no answer. Mr. Warner began to get uneasy. He wished it wasnlt quite so dark. tiMiss KeatingeAnne, Ilm a brute? ciGrlad to hear you acknowledge it? itI am. I had no right toeal ccOf course you didnitltl iiI am a wretched villain, a worm in the dust. I have no right to live at all, and I humbly beg your forgiveness?7 Miss Keatingk shoulders were shaking. Warner could not decide whether from laughter or weeping. So he had to move up a little closer to find out. It probably turned out to be the former, for, whereas before the moon had revealed two shadows, it now showed but one. Julia Ward Howe MARGARET LAHEY With Monday, October 17, came the death of one of wide reputation and interest, J ulia Ward Howe. She was ninety-one years of age. Her life has been one long chain of unselfish and untiring services to mankind. She is chiefly thought of in connection with her writings, but she is also identified with prison reform movements, the equal suffrage movement7 and numerous activities of a philanthropical char- acter. Her one great desire was to uplift man- kind, and when at the age of twentyufour, she married Dr. Samuel Grindley Howe, she found in him a companion of high ideals and cease- less activities. Mrs. Howe came of a family of culture and early showed great literary tastes. She was all her life a leader in thought and progress, and was at all times associated with men and wo- men of great attainments, among whom were Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and the older J ohn J acob Astor. Mrs. Howets works are: ttThe Passion Flowers? WWorks for the Hour? ilA Trip to Cuba? itThe Worldls Own? tiFrom the Oak t0 the Olivef7 iiLater Lyrics? ctSeX and Edu- cation? ltMemoir of Samuel Grindley Howef, icLife of Margaret F uller,77 tiModern Society;9 tiIs Modern Society Polite?7 4iFrom Sunset Ridgefi c4Sketches of Representative New. Eng land Women? She is survived by four children, Mrs. Flor- ence Howe Hall, a prominent woman suffra- gist; Mrs. Laura E. Richards, an author; Mrs. Maude Howe Elliot, wife of the artist, John Elliot; and Prof. Henry Marion Howe, pro- fessor of metallurgy at Columbia University. It is given to few women to attain the heights which she reached and at the same time to remain as sweet, as unassuming, and as womanly7 as did she. A nation owes a debt to such womanhood, a nation has need of such citizens. But if Julia Ward Howe has no other monument, this will be suchientethat the words of her great song, cVIlhe Battle Hymn of the Republic? have rested and will continue to rest, on the lips of a nation from the merest child to the oldest veteran.

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10 THE NORMAL ADVANCE of it as Horace did from his more simply-tilled acres. We trust that Horace did a little hoeing and farming himself, and that his verse is not all fraudulent sentiment. In order to enjoy . agriculture, you do not want too much of it, and you want to be poor enough to have a little inducement to work moderately yourself. Hoe while it is spring and enjoy the best anticipa- tions. It is not much matter if things do not turn .out well. DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE Artificial Purification of Water ELMER A. ROW Pure water is becoming more and more recog- nized as a necessity for the preservation of life and health. This conviction has been growing from the time of the earliest ancient peoples, and is every day becoming a question not alone for the chemist, but for the consumer as well. Pliny, a recognized ancient historian, devoted much space to the discussion of pure water, and other writers did likewise. Conditions in those times were not any different in regard to the quantity of water at hand than they are at the present time. Rome built nearly four hundred miles of aqueducts which supplied her population with fresh pure water from the mountains, instead of the Tiber river. TheSe must have been built at an enormous expense, many times greater than that of installing a modern filter plant, yet the Romans recognized their value, and what Rome saw the necessity of she generally obtained. Traces of the im- mense cisterns, eighteen in number, may still be seen at Carthage, which drew her water supply from springs nearly fifty miles away. This demand has grown through centuries until now we must have water, purified not only by nature, but also by mechanical means until we know absolutely that we are drinking pure water. But why be so exacting as to the quality of naturels beverage? By far the greater per cent of cases of our most dreaded fever, typhoid, may be traced directly to the presence of the Bacillus Typhosus in the water supply from which the patient used. In a great many instances the great outbreaks of cholera and plague in the far East were check- ed only when a supply of pure water was made available. These facts alone are sufficient to demand pure water for our future use. The increased demand together with the increased population has lessened the reserve supply and so has made artificial purification necessary. There are three chief methods of purifying water7 namely, distillation, pure filtration and the formation of a precipitate in the water, which is afterwards filtered off. Beside these there are various other methods which if prac- ticable have never been extensively applied. These include the aeration process, Electrolytic process and diiferent kinds of household lilters, some of which may yet be much used. The iirst three named7 however, are the ones which are used extensively and of which a brief descrip- tion will be given. The distillation process is the one which is used where absolutely pure water from a chemical standpoint is required. The method varies, but in the main consists of evaporating the raw water andipassing the steam through a coil which is kept cool by the surrounding water. From this the pure water passes into a reservoir. On account of the use to which this water is put, the ordinary apparatus for this method is a small still known as a whisky still, capable of producing from ten to twentwaive gallons per day. The use of this system is not nearly so extensive as that of the other sys- tems, principally on account of the expense at- tached to it. It is estimated that it costs about twelve hundred and fifty dollars per million a gallons, while by the other two processes water