and house refuse are unfit filling for low ground on which it is intended to build.  Cobble pavements are admirably adapted to soaking-up and afterwards emitting unwholesome matters.  Asphalt has none of this fault.  Wood is pernicious in this respect.  “Gullies” in cellar floors should be properly trapped; and this does not mean that they shall have bell-traps nor siphon-traps with shallow water-seal.  Cellar windows should be movable to let in air, and should have painted wire-screens to keep out cats, rats, etc.  New walls are always damp.  Window sills should project well out beyond the walls, and should be grooved underneath so as to throw the water clear of the walls.  Cracks in floors, between the boards, help the accumulation of dirt and dust, and may harbor vermin.  Narrow boards of course have narrower interstitial cracks than wide boards do.  “Secret nailing” is best where it can be afforded.  Hot-air flues should never be carried close to unprotected woodwork.  Electric bells, when properly put up and cared for, are a great convenience in a house; but when they don’t work, they are about as aggravating as the law allows.  Cheap pushbuttons cause a great deal of annoyance.  Silver-plated faucets and trimmings blacken with illuminating and sewer gases.  Nickel-plating is perhaps a less pleasing white, but is cheaper and does not discolor readily.  Windows are in most respects a great blessing; but there may be too much of a good thing.  It is unreasonable to expect that one grate or stove or furnace can heat a whole county.  Don’t attempt it.  If you have too many windows on the “cold side” of a house, give them double sashes (not double panes), and “weather-strip” them.  Unpainted trimmings should be of hardwood.  Yellow pine finishes up well.  Butternut is brighter than walnut.  Cherry makes a room cheerful.  Walnut is dull and dismal.

The Forests of the World.—­The rapid exhaustion of the forests of the world, and more particularly of the once great reserves of timber in the United States and Canada, renders it inevitable that, in a very few years indeed, iron must supersede wood for a variety of uses.  The drain upon the world’s resources in timber is prodigious.  Every year 92,000,000 railway sleepers are used in America alone, while to supply firewood for the whole of the States, fourteen times the quantity of wood consumed by the railways is annually required.  At the computation of the most recent statistics there were 441,000,000 of acres of woodland in the United States; but since over 50,000,000 of acres are cut down yearly, this great area of timber will be non-existent in less than twenty years, unless replanting upon a very extensive scale be at once undertaken.  Already efforts are being made in this direction, and not long since some 4,000,000 of saplings were planted in a single day in Kansas and the neighboring States.  But since the daily consumption is even greater than this, it is obvious that the work of replanting must be undertaken systematically if it is to keep pace, even approximately, with the destruction.  In France and Germany, where the forests are national property, forestry has been elevated to the status of an exact science; but the timber lands of those countries are small indeed compared with those in the United States.