Herbert's Weekly from Hiawatha, Kansas • 3

HERBERT'S WEEKLY and the elk and the bear in their pens. Ishi intimates, the professors say, that he is happy and contented, but ever so often, he wants to stroll over to the bear cages. Then he gazes a long time at the old grizzlies, looks longingly at the mountains across the bay, heaves a big sigh and goes back to his little room in the basement of a modern building of learning. No one in particular owns Ishi. He's just Ishi the last of his tribe; J.

P. II. A READERS NOTES. R. H.

AlILENSTIEIIL makes the astonishing statement that mankind is fast loosing its approach. Dr. Ahlcnstiehl points to the fact that even of such individuals who are able to easily distinguish simple odors very few are able to distinguish complex odors. A man may be able to tell the smell of onions, but the same man in all probability will not be able to tell the ingredients of an odor in which onions and phosphorus blend. The eye, however, carefully trained throughout the centuries, is able at a glance to tell apart not only individual colors, but groups of colors and varying forms and designs.

In this sense the history of the sense of smell is reversed. The highly cultured ancient Greeks possessed a very defective color sense. The sense of smell is easily fatigued. A man who works in a fertilizer factory or at sewer work becomes accustomed to the smell of his clothes in a very short time, and no longer minds the stench which emanates from them. Similarly, on entering a room in which the air is foul, our sense of smell, unless it is entirely atrophied, warns us of the fact.

If we remain in the room for a few minutes, our im-poverished sense of smell suffers from fatigue and we no longer smell the bad air. Physical discomfort may arise in other ways; we may suffer from headache or nausea if we remain in the room long enuf and arc uncomfortable enuf to possess a sensitive stomach. If not, no immediate ill effects will arise from the vitiated air, because the sense of smell has become such a weakling through centuries of disuse that it cannot continue to follow up its first warning with a succession of warnings. 2ft ifi tf It has been decided to publish the so-called J'Djournals" of the ex-Sultan Abdul Hamid. These are the most authenticated records of his terrible 33 years' reign, and will throw valuable light-on the social conditions and court life during the reign of the "Red Assassin." They include historical memoranda, diaries, letters of denunciation, transactions of the slave market, sanctions of -executions and tortures, notes, bills, accounts and statements of innumerable spies, feverish scriblings of falsehood and treachery, Machiavellian records and registers, and testimonies of unheard of oppression and cruelty.

These will give a Juried insight into the fierce, gloomy and melancholy moods and haunting fears of the Nero of the eastern Rome, and will reveal iniquity and wickedness rarely paralleled in the world's history. Soon after the deposition of the red sultan those at the head of the constitutional regime made every possible effort to get hold of all his journals, writes the Constantinople correspondent of the London Chronicle. Search was made for them in all the vast quarters of Yildiz Kiosk, in the subterranean passages and caves, the secret recesses of the "Sclamilik" (part of a Moslem house assigned for men), and even in the sacred domain of the imperial harem, with its beauties. The search was in vain. Abdul had to disclose the whereabouts of the documents himself.

He kept them in a hidden chamber close to his bedroom. The access was know only to him. It was shut and opened by an ingenious electrical contrivance, the workings of which none could ever discover. When this hid- den chamber was entered there were found in it piles of boxes of various sizes filled with journals. Over 500 such boxes were brought to light.

Abdul never destroyed any letter sent to him, however insignificant or however unimportant the sender. The strange thing is that among the countless journals of Abdul Hamid not a single line is found written by himself. He never wrote anything. He had an unaccountable sense of smell, the curious degeneration of this sense apparently being one of the penalties of civilization. Tlje reasons for this are greatly diversified and of somewhat contradictory nature.

When life was simpler than now there were not nearly as many different odors as now, and the odors of past ages were delicate and evanescent compared to the odors of today. Hundreds of people today are utterly indifferent, to the perfume of flowers, and in many instances they have lost the power to sense the flower's fragrance because the stronger odors of up-to-date life artificially produced by new chemical inventions have deadened their faculty for perceiving the more elusive odors of nature. Ojir grandfathers had a hundred different odors, whereas we have thousands of odors, all of them incidental to our more complex civilization', and all of them strong. Compare the fragrance of the lily of the valley with the smell of gasoline or the smell of carbolic acid and iodoform: Persons of the older generation loathe the "automobile" and the "hospital" smells and are ravished by the- perfume of the lily of the valley. Yet there arc thousands of young persons who would sniff and sniff in-a vain effort to sense the fragrance of the flower, but who, on the contrary, not merely do not dislike the smell of gasoline and iodoform, but actually enjoy it, these two odors being so strong that none whose sense of smell is not positively atrophied can escape perceiving them.

There is a further reason for our inability to detect iesscr odors. We do not need 'to perceive them as men and women formerly needed them, in order to maintain our footing in the struggle for existence. Humboldt, in his "Kosmos," tells of a race-of Peruvian Indians who were able to track their game by the scent quite as well as dogs, and the physicians of the Middle Ages were able to diagnose a disease by the smell, those stricken by the plague, the cholera and consumption each exuding an odor pertaining to that particular disease. As the symptoms of some diseases in the incipient stages are similar oridentical, the method of making a final diagnosis by means of sense of smell was generally practiced throughout Europe in the so-called Middle Ages. As medical science was at a very low stage of development at that time, this test, grotesque and unscientific as it now appears to the veriest lay mind, was then the nearest to an infallible test possible.

As medical science progressed this method fell into disuse, became obsolete and is now all but forgotten. No medical practitioner of today would be able to tell a disease solely by the odor exuded by the patient. Thus, too primeval man needed a keener scent than do the city dwellers of today, for whom sound and sight are the more important senses that make the protection against injury. Primeval man could not always sec or hear a beast of prey. He relied upon his nose as the only trustworthy organ to warn him of the brute's.