TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14979, 28 May 1914, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

The Surprise Test.

It is the hour just before the dawn. The littlo town, sleeps beneath a cover of black shadows, unbroken save for tho red and green bulls-eyes of the switch lights and the bright green signal-lamp near the station. Suddenly a dark figuro steals out from the shadows along the railway track. Reaching the signal near the station, it climbsv to the* top, extinguishes the light behind tho green glass, and slipping down, disappears once more into the shadows. EBardly is this act com-, pie ted when there is a rumbling among tho sleeping hills, a bright head-light pierces the gloom, and the express comes racing down the valley. There is a rattling and clanking and grinding of brakes, and the' train etops with her pilot just under the,thin black shadow of the signal. . . This is not part of » scene from a sensational magazine story or a description of a moving-picture film. The scene described is one which occurs perhaps every night of the year on one or other of the railroads of America. The mysterious figure which, extinguishes tho light is not a train-wrecker or even a train-robber, but merely an officer of the road carrying out a "surprise test," the purpose of which is to check the engine-driver's obedience to BignaJs and to show how he would act were the

conditions real. Some of the tests are related by a writer in the "Sunset Magazine." To be. adequate the tests havo to be carefully elaborated and carried out. They must vary, tco, with each man t«»ted; for once a man has detected one trick ho can never bo fooled by it again. As a rule the superintendent, or his subordinate, who arranges the setting, changes the green light- to red, instead of leaving the signal in titter darkness. Sometimes the officers pay no attention io the light, but arrange the surprises tfr how the engineers regard other rules than those directly connected with the. signals. The vice-president of ono tho great systems west of tho ilississippi not long ago went out on a tour of inspection. His private car. which was attached to the passenger-train, looked like an ordinary car, and tho engineer, not knowing whom he had aboard, and coming to a long grade on which it was customary to make up for lost time, started to "lot lior go." Tho vioe-pre.sident soon became aware lhat the train wn*> running at an unusually high speed. Ho watched the indicator mark .Vi, GO, and then climb to 70 and finaljy to 79 miles per hoar. At tho next station the engineer was summarily given a thirty-day ''lay off," for there was a rulo forbidding n speed of over 60 miles an hour, no matter how late tho train might be. Cosmic Dust and Disease. Medical authorities arc always warn- | ing us of the dangers of dust as a. breeder and transmitter of disease, and the efforts of modern sanitation are largely directed accordingly at getting ,rid of dust as far as possible. The , taskj however, would seem to be a rather hopeless ono, for according to tho "Medical Council" (Philadelphia), we have not only the dust of our own planet to contend with, but the universal "cosmic dust," which is perpetually invading our atmosphere. "The kingdom of dust is a universal one, and the rulo of this kingdom spells disease," the writer observes gloomily; "tho kingdom of dust is tho kingdom of death." And he proceeds to tell about the countless millions of imported "germs that aro eternally streaming in upon our already sufficiently germ-ridden planet. Darwin described a shower of 6trango organisms covering an area of over a million squaro miles. Weber' found myriads of them in a fall of so-called "yellow enow" at Peckoloh, in Germany. In October, 1846, over a hundred unknown organisms wero observed as charging a fall of cosmic dust in France. Ehrenberg estimated that 45 tons of organic forms fell in this shower, and similar falle occurred in Italy in 1755, in 1803, and in Calabria in 1813, whilo Palestine and Western Kentucky have also experienced immense showers of dust charged with organic life. To these invading ewarms tho moisturo of our atmosphere must act as a cultural medium, and the writer goes co far as to attributo to them the otherwise inexplicable outbreaks in certain regions of disease epidemics, and the origin of many new diseases. It is consoling to reflect, however, that germs axe not necessarily disease germs by any means, so that the theory is not so appalling after all. Still, tho idea of getting strange diseases imported from neighbouring planets, after the style of an H. G. Wells romance, is fax from agreeable. ,