fatally necessary; but yet it is not easy to avoid. We seldom see that a whole family is virtuous; the good and evil cannot well agree; and the evil can yet less agree with one another; even the virtuous fall sometimes to variance, when their virtues are of different kinds and tending to extremes. In general, those parents have most reverence that most deserve it: for he that lives well cannot be despised.

"Many other evils infest private life. Some are the slaves of servants whom they have trusted with their affairs. Some are kept in continued anxiety by the caprice of rich relatives, whom they cannot please and dare not offend. Some husbands are imperious, and some wives perverse: and as it is always more easy to do evil than good, though the wisdom or virtue of one can very rarely make many happy, the fally or vice of one may often make many miserable."

"If such be the general effect of marriage," said the prince, "I shall, for the future, think it dangerous to connect my interest with that of another, lest I should be unhappy by my partner's fault."

"I have met," said the princess, "with many who live single For that reason; but I have never found that their prudence ought to raise envy. They dream away their time without friendship, without fondness, and are driven to rid themselves of the day, for which they have no use, by childish amusements or vicious delights. They act as beings under the constant sense of some known inferiority, that fills their minds with rancor; and their tongues with censure. They are peevish at home, and malevolent abroad; and, as the outlaws of human nature, make it their business and their pleasure to disturb that society which debars them from its privileges. To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."

"What, then, is to be done?" said Rasselas; "the more we inquire the less we can resolve. Surely he is most likely to please himself that has no other inclination or regard."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.

NOTES CONTRIBUTED FOR THE "IMPROVEMENT ERA" BY THE FACULTY OF SCIENCE, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY,

AND EDITED BY DR. JOHN A. WIDTSOE.

Rubber From Wheat.

William T. Walsh, in the Technical World magazine for December, states that a substance chemically identical with Indiarubber may be made from wheat, and that a process has been arrived at for its manufacture.

The wheat has to be treated with ptyalin, the active ferment of the saliva of the mouth. Thus far they are able to find no substitute for this ferment. It is proposed to get the piyalin from the hog.

Six grades of cereal rubber can be made, by interrupting the action of the ptyalin at the proper time. Among the uses to which these various grades of rubber may be put, are mentioned the following: for waterproofing; for tubes and other flexible material; for tires; as a substitute for linoleum; for paving purposes.

Already a movement is started in England to push the manufacture of this new product. It is estimated that the cereal rubber will be sold much cheaper than the natural rubber.

It was by mere accident that W. I. Carr, an Englishman, first got the suggestion, which led to this great discovery. One day, while walking through a grain field, and chewing some of the wheat, he noticed the glutinous compound produced. The active ferment of the saliva acts on the starch, changing it into dextrose,

and this, by proper treatment, acquires the characteristics of rubber.

Need of a State Pure Food Bill.

Beginning with last January, articles of food must be passed on before they can be sold outside the state in which they are produced. Also patent medicines must bear a statement on the outside of the bottle, showing exactly the ingredients.

But this regulation does not apply to the sale of the food or the medicine in the state in which it is made. Candy made and sold in our own state may be colored with coal-tar dye, olive oil may consist largely of cottonseed oil, benzoic acid may be used as a preservative in canned fruit, and all without the interference of the national pure food bill. What we really need is a state pure food and patent medicine law. North Dakota has already set the example.

Attraction at a Distance,

How can one body attract another at a distance? Is attraction at a distance consistent with our ordinary ideas of the properties of matter? Or again, does a body actually attract a distant one? Because a stone always falls to the earth, because one magnet suspended even in a vacuum always turns around at the approach of another magnet; because one electrically charged body is always repelled by a similar one, shall we go on saying, and be content with saying, as the older generation said, "These things attract each other?" These are words of little meaning, behind which we hide our ignorance of the manner in which all ether phenomena occur.

Some there are who are content to stop here, to be satisfied with the fact that there appears to be a repulsion or an attraction between two distant bodies or electric charges, or electric currents, and to say that all is said, that these apparent attractions are real and cannot be explained in terms of anything simpler. Orson Pratt seems to have been unsatisfied with an "explanation" which expressed the facts without explaining them, for in his essay on "The Great First Cause," he propounded a theory of a selfmoving matter, which gave the appearance only of attraction. He insisted that it was absurd to speak of a particle acting, where it is not, or across empty space. Whatever the difficulties of his

own theory, he certainly agreed with later thought in his dissatisfaction with the use of the pretentious word "attraction" as an explanation.

Modern science is doing the very thing formerly thought impossible. It is explaining these apparent attractions in terms of something simpler. The something simpler is the kind of action that one particle of any ordinary elastic body can produce upon another particle of that same body at some distance from the first. If you take hold of a rope which is hanging from the ceiling, and give it a pull, the force is passed from the lowest to the highest point of the rope, and thus the lowest particles attract the highest, but only by the intervention of the particles between them. The force is passed along the rope in a perfectly continuous and gradual manner. Each particle pulls on the one above it, which in turn pulls on the one above it, until the pull is handed on to the highest point. In a perfectly analogous manner, according to modern views, the transmission of gravitational, electrical and magnetic, in a word, ether-forces, takes place.

All the apparent "attractions" and "repulsions" of electric and magnetic charges can be explained as being produced by stresses in an all-pervading ether, in which we live and move and have our being. These stresses are similar to those which hold together all the small particles which compose a stone or a block of wood. More than this, the stresses which produce what we have called attractions have actually been calculated in every case, in terms of the electric or magnetic charges, the electric currents or the attracting matter which give rise to them.

Thus the study of light, gravitation, and electro-magnetism, brings us by diverse pathways face to face with one and the same medium, the ether, -a vast, shoreless sea, on which the planets ride; whose waves of stress and strain and pressure, cross and intercross and are superposed, speeding through space with enormous velocity, until they disperse and die away in the boundless, unknown, and it may be to us unknowable, regions of universal space. And it is to a knowledge of the properties of this mysterious substance that man may look for a key to some of the choicest mysteries of the heavens and the earth.-Chester Snow, A.B. Provo, Utah.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

THE "LIAHONA."

In the Christmas greeting of the First Presidency, found in the January number of the ERA, reference is made to the publication of periodicals in several of the missions. It is further announced that "some of the missions desire to have a mission paper published regularly to take the place of the tracts, and as this would be published regularly, it would keep before the people new issues arising, and the experiences of the elders, as well as explaining the doctrines of the Church. We think such a plan feasible, and that it will be productive of much good." In conformity with this plan, the presidents of the Eastern, Northern, Central and Colorado missions, who are the advisory publication board, have perfected plans for the publication of the Liahona, a weekly, $1.00 per annum, sixteen-page, three-column religious magazine at Independence, Jackson county, Missouri, the first copy of which appears April 6. The Central states mission, S. O. Bennion president, changed headquarters from Kansas City to No. 302 South Pleasant Street, Independence, Missouri, on March 1, this year.

The name of the new publication is selected from the Book of Mormon, and means, being interpreted, a compass. It was the miraculous instrument which was found by Lehi and which served him and his colony as a director in their travels through the wilderness and over the water from Jerusalem to the promised rest and land in America. The Deseret News, in speaking of the probable etymology of the word says: "The word is both Egyptian and Hebrew, and in both languages signifies 'light.' Liahona, or L Jah Ona"-L (to) Jah (Jehovah) On (House of the Sun)-"then,