1878

Bouton's star-gazing eyes are now turned to guarding his steps. Since hunting has been prohibited in the state, reptiles have multiplied. Hunters kept them down. In raking his yard recently he raked blindly under an overhanging bush, precisely where a little later his son found and shot a coiled rattlesnake.

Of himself he says his mind plays some queer tricks, memory is becoming treacherous, in simple mathematics and even in spelling he finds himself making absurd blunders, while any attempt at serious thinking leaves him exhausted. Still he evidently does think seriously Hayt wonders how Harlow (and Parkinson, too) can pass so much time asleep. Says he has always been a night owl, lies awake half the night, and it isn't because of an uneasy conscience either Parkhurst looks as rugged as ever, but says his underpinning isn't as sound as it was in the day of his giant stride Two questions of public welfare are agitating us antediluvians, and we want to see them cleared up before we leave the Ark. One is whether the right to strike, added since the flood to the Bill of Rights we have been fighting for, carries with it freedom to deprive the rest of us of milk for our babes, fuel, light and newspapers for our homes, power for our industries, transportation, telephone and radio for our activities, and license to use violence in enforcing that extraordinary right? .... The other question is whether the method by which the atom has been split should be a military secret, Three of us who have expressed ourselves agree that from our standpoint on the threshold of the Ark, instead of such a challenge to the militarists to go us one better, the secret should be released and the scientists of the world enjoined to develop the method for constructive uses.

Secretary and Treasurer 1 Chapin Court, Southbridge, Mass.