Chapter 7

Walden's Ridge has a total population of a little more than 4,000, scattered over 600 square miles of surface. The number of dwellings is about 800. Ninety per cent. of these are log houses; 70 per cent. of them are without glass windows; light being furnished through the doorways, always open in the daytime, the shuttered window openings, and the open spaces between the logs of the walls. Less than 2 per cent. of these houses have plastered walls or ceilings, and less than 5 per cent. have ceiled walls or ceilings. About 20 per cent. of them are fairly well chinked with clay between the logs, the remainder being but indifferently built in that particular. Fully 90 per cent. of these abodes admit of free access of air at all times of day and night, through the floors beneath as well as the walls and roof above. It is the custom of the people to guard against the coldest of days and nights by hanging bed clothes against the walls, and many good housewives have a supply of tidy drapery which they keep alone for this purpose.

Wood, always at hand, is the only fuel in use. The whole heating apparatus consists in one large open fireplace, built of stone, communicating with a large chimney outside the house at one end, and frequently scarcely as high as the one story building which supports it. This chimney is constructed in such a manner as to be a great ventilator of the whole room, quite sufficient, it would be thought, if there were no other means of ventilation. It is usually made of stone at the base, and that part above the fire is of sticks laid upon one another, cobhouse fashion, and plastered over inside and between with similar clay as that with which the house walls are chinked.

Very few of these houses are more than one story high. They are all covered with long split oak shingles--the people there call them "boards"--rifted from the trunks of selected trees. There is no sheathing on the roof beneath these shingles. They are nailed down upon the flat hewn poles running across the rafters, at convenient distances. Looking up through the many openings in the roof in one of these house, one would think that this would be but poor protection against rain, but they rarely leak.

Not one family in fifty is provided with a cooking stove. They bake their bread in flat iron kettles, with iron covers, covered with hot coals and ashes. These they call ovens. The meat is fried, with only the exception of when accompanied by "turnip greens."

The question, "What is the principal food of the people who live on these mountains?" has been asked by me several hundred times. The almost invariable answer has been, "Corn bread, bacon, and coffee." Occasionally biscuits and game have been mentioned in the answers. All food is eaten hot. Coffee is usually an accompaniment of all three meals, and is drunk without cream and often without sugar. Some families eat beef and mutton for one or two of the colder months in the year on rare occasions, though beef is commonly considered "onfit to go upon," as I was told upon several occasions, and mutton sustains less reputation. Chickens are used for food while they are young and tender enough to fry, on occasions of quarterly meetings, visits of "kinfolks" or the "preachers" and the traveling doctors. Fat young lambs are plenty in many settlements from March to October, and can be had at fifty cents each, but I could not learn that one was ever eaten.

A large majority of the adult population use tobacco in some shape--the men by chewing or smoking, the women by smoking or dipping snuff. They never have dyspepsia, nor do they ever get flesh, after they pass out of childhood, though nearly all the children are ruddy in appearance, and well rounded with fat.

One physical type prevails among the people in middle life, and carries along into old age but little change; and old age is common there. Nearly every house has its old man or old woman, or both. Everybody, father and mother, and frequently grandfather and grandmother, is still on hand, looking as brisk and moving about as lively as the newer generations. After they pass their forty years, they never seem to grow any older for the next twenty or thirty, and the grandfathers and grandmothers can scarcely be selected, by comparison, from their own children and grandchildren. The men are taller than the average, and the women, relatively, taller than the men. They are all thin featured, bright eyed, long haired, sharp looking people, with every appearance of strength and power of endurance.

I think the men who live on Walden's Ridge can safely challenge the world as walkers--aborigines and all; and unless the challenge should be accepted by their own women folks, I feel quite sure they would "win the boots." They go everywhere on foot, and never seem to tire.

Nearly all the people of the Tablelands are employed in the pursuits of agriculture. Very few of them seem to be hard workers. The men are all great lovers of the forest sports, much given to the good, reliable, old fashioned long rifles. The women and children are much employed in out door occupations, and live a great portion of their time in the open air. The clothing of all classes is scanty. The use of woolen fabrics for underwear has not yet been introduced, and coarse cotton domestic is the universal shirting, and cotton jeans, or cotton and wool mixed, constitute the staple for outer wearing apparel. The men wear shoes throughout the year much more commonly than boots. They never wear gloves, mittens, scarfs, or overcoats, and they scorn umbrellas. Probably this whole 4,000 people do not possess two dozen umbrellas or twice as many overcoats. The women go about home with bare feet a great part of the summer. They never wear corsets or other lacing.

I have learned by careful inquiry that very few of the people of the Ridge have ever had the diseases of childhood. Scarlet fever I could hear of in but two places, and I suppose that not one person in fifty has had it. Whooping cough and measles have occurred but rarely, and the large majority have not yet experienced the realities of either. Very few people there have ever been vaccinated, nor has smallpox ever prevailed. Typhoid, typhus, and intermittent fevers are unknown. In the great rage of typhoid fever which took place ten or twelve years ago in the Tennessee and Sequatchee Valleys, not a single case occurred on the Mountains, as I have been informed by physicians who were engaged in practice in the neighborhood at the time. Diphtheria has never found a victim there; so of croup. Nobody has nasal catarrh there, and a cough or a cold is exceedingly rare.

I have said that these observations refer more particularly to Walden's Ridge than to the Cumberland Tablelands in our State as a whole. This ridge was chosen by me for this examination, mainly for the reason of its convenience, but partly owing to its being more generally settled than any other equal portion of the table which lies in Tennessee. Lookout Mountain is not as well located; it is on the wrong side of the Tennessee River, and but a few acres of it belong in this State. Sand Mountain is altogether out of the State, but it is perhaps nearer like Walden's Ridge in its physical features than Lookout. That part of the Cumberlands west of Sequatchee Valley is Walden's Ridge in duplicate, excepting that it is further west, and nearer the Middle Tennessee basin. There are some small towns, villages of miners, and summer resorts there, which interferes with that evenness of the distribution of population which Walden's Ridge has, rendering it more liable to visitations of epidemic and contagious diseases. The tablelands north of the center line of the State, above Grassy Cove, are very similar to Walden's Ridge, as far up as Kentucky, with the exception before mentioned--that of climate--it being from one to ten degrees colder in winter.

This whole Cumberland Table is no small country. It comprises territory enough to make a good sized State. At present, it is almost one great wilderness, in many particulars as unknown as the Black Hills. It is coming into the world now, and will be well known in a few years. The great city of Cincinnati has determined to build a railroad through the very center of this great table in the north part of the State, connecting with Chattanooga in the southern part. This road is nearly bored through, and in another year or two the Cumberland Tablelands in Tennessee will be much heard of at home and abroad.

It seems to me this country has merits. It is located in the latitude of mild climate; not so far south as to be scorched by the hot summer sun, or visited by the great life destroying epidemics; not so far north as to meet the severe and lengthened winters.

Climate, we know, is a fixture; it has a government; it has rules; the weather may change, but climate does not; it is a permanent out-door affair, and what is true of to-day was true centuries ago, and will be true forever, in the measure of any practical scope, at least. The people of the world are beginning to know that the greatest destroyer of human life has its remedy in climate.

Mr. Lombard, in his famous exhibit in relation to the prevalence of consumption among the people of different occupations, circumstances of life, and place of dwelling, gives the lowest number of deaths from this cause to those who live in the open air. He found the people who lived most in the open air, as would be readily conjectured, in the mild latitudes, not in the countries of hot sands or cold snows.

[The above article, in regard to which we have noticed frequent allusions in many of our exchanges, all erroneously attributing it to _Dr. Wright_, of Tennessee, and for which we have received repeated requests quite recently, was read by the lamented Dr. E.M. Wight at the 43d annual meeting of the Tennessee State Medical Society, held at Nashville, April 4, 5, and 6, 1876. Its distinguished and talented author will long be remembered as one of the most active, earnest, and zealous members of the State Society. At this meeting he also read a very admirable paper on "The Microscopic Appearance of the Blood in Syphilis," and prepared the report of the Committee on State Board of Health, to which report may be ascribed the honor of securing the necessary legislation organizing the Board. A true, upright, honest man, an earnest, devoted and zealous physician, universally esteemed and beloved by all who knew him; himself the subject of tuberculosis, dying in the prime of a brilliant manhood. He had but few equals in the glorious profession he honored and loved so well.

From a careful reading of his paper, we find that he describes a large area of territory, free, absolutely free, from subsoil moisture, a climate mild and equable, a soil capable of producing nearly everything necessary for the comfortable maintenance of human life, surroundings that tempt, nay, compel the greatest possible amount of open air life. His description is exceedingly accurate of a plain, primitive, simple-minded people with but few wants, many of the virtues and few of the vices of humanity. With their surroundings, soil, climate, residence, and mode of living, need we be surprised that "there is a people," or a land "free from consumption"?--ED.]--_Southern Practitioner_.

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THE TREATMENT OF HABITUAL CONSTIPATION.

Dr. F.P. Atkinson thus writes in the _Practitioner_, January, 1884: I suppose there is no derangement of the system we are more frequently called upon to treat than habitual constipation; and though all kinds of medicines are suggested for its relief, they rarely produce more than temporary benefit--and it is difficult to see how the result can well be otherwise, while the root of the evil remains untouched. Now by far the more numerous subjects of this disorder are women; and as they do not seem to know that regularity is essential to the performance of every one of nature's operations, they appoint no stated times for trying to get the bowels relieved, but trust to receiving intimation when the rectal accumulation and distension can be borne no longer. This method of action may and does answer fairly well for a time; but nature gradually gets upset, the sensation of the lower bowel becomes blunted, and at last it ceases to respond to the ordinary stimulus. Then aperients are regularly resorted to, and although these act fairly well for a time, they gradually have to be increased in strength and frequency. Now, as regards the treatment, the first thing to be accomplished is of course to get the rectum well relieved; the next, to get the actions to take place at fixed times; and lastly, it is necessary to get more tone imparted to the muscular tissue of the bowels, so that the regularity of action may be helped and also maintained. In order, then, to get the bowels relieved in the first instance, it is well to give five grains of both compound colocynth and compound rhubarb pill at bed-time (this rarely requires to be repeated), then to take a tumblerful of cold water the next morning on waking, and repeat it regularly at the same time each day. Should the bowels remain sluggish for some time, the same quantity of water may be taken daily before each meal. Supposing no action takes place on rising or shortly after, a small injection of warm water may be resorted to. After each movement of the bowels, a small hand-ball syringeful of _cold_ water should be thrown into the rectum and retained. A soup plateful of coarse oatmeal porridge (made with water and taken according to the Scotch method, viz., by filling half the spoon with the hot porridge and the other with cold milk) each night at bed-time, or even every night and morning for a time, is often a very great help. But above all things, it is necessary for the patient to _try_ and get relief at a certain _fixed_ time regularly every day. If these directions are strictly carried out in their entirety, the evil, even if it has been of long standing, will generally be corrected, and the patient will improve in health and appearance. Of course where the constipation results from exhaustion of the nervous system (such, for instance, as is brought about by self-abuse), the special cause has to be taken into consideration, and such treatment adopted as is suited to the particular necessities of the case.

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THE PYRAMIDS OF MEROE.

About fifty miles from the mouth of the Atbara, and, of course, on the eastern bank of the Nile, stand the pyramids of Meroe. They consist of three groups, and there are, in all, about eighty pyramids. The presumption is that they represent the old sepulchers of the kings of Meroe. Candance, Queen of the Ethiopians, mentioned in Acts, chap. viii., v. 27, is supposed to have belonged to Meroe, that being the name also of the capital, which is understood to have been somewhere not far distant from the sepulchers. These pyramids of Meroe possess one marked feature, distinguishing them from the pyramids of Egypt proper--that is, they have an external doorway or porch. As there is no entrance to the pyramid at these porticoes, it is quite possible that they were temples for worship or making offerings to the dead. By comparing them with the pyramids of Ghizeh, it will be seen that they are also taller in proportion to their base. Another important point in these porches or temples is the existence of the arch; and that, too, an arch in principle, with a keystone.--_Illustrated London News_.

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THE PROLIFICNESS OF THE OYSTER.

In an article by Prof. Karl Mobius on "The Oyster and Oyster Culture," reproduced in the recently issued report of the U. S. Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, the author says:

A mature egg-bearing oyster lays about one million of eggs, so that during the breeding season there are upon our oyster beds at least 2,200,000,000,000 young oysters, which surely would suffice to transform the entire extent of the sea-flats into an unbroken oyster bed; for if such a number of young oysters should be distributed over a surface 74 kilometers long by 22 broad, 1,351 oysters would be allotted to every square meter. But this sum of 2,200,000,000,000 young oysters is undoubtedly less than that in reality hatched out, for not only do those full-grown oysters which are over six years of age spawn, but they begin to propagate during their second or third year, although it is true that the young ones have fewer eggs than those which are fully developed. At a very moderate estimation, the total number of three to six year old oysters which lie upon our beds will produce three hundred billions of eggs. This number added to that produced by the five millions of full grown oysters would give for every square meter of surface not merely 1,351 young oysters, but at least 1,535. In order to determine how many eggs oysters produce, they must be examined during their spawning season. This begins upon the Schleswig-Holstein beds in the middle of June, and lasts until the end of August or beginning of September. The spawning oyster does not allow its ripe eggs to fall into the water, as do many other mollusks, but retains them in the so-called beard, the mantle, and gill-plates until they become little swimming animals. The eggs are white, and cover the mantle and gill-plates as a semi-fluid, cream-like mass. As soon as they leave the generative organs the development of the germ begins. The entire yolk-mass of the egg divides into cells, and these cells form a hollow, sphere-like body, in which an intestinal canal arises by the invagination of one side. Very soon the beginnings of the shell appear along the right and left sides of the back of the embryo, and not long afterward a ciliated pad, the velum, is formed along the under side. This velum can be thrust out from between the valves of the shell at the will of the young animal, and used by the motion of its cilia as an organ for driving food to the mouth, or in swimming as a rudder. During these transformations the original cream-white color of the germ changes into pale gray, and finally into a deep bluish-gray color. At this time they have a long oval outline, and are from 0.15 to 0.18 of a millimeter in breadth. Over 300,000 can find room upon a square centimeter of surface. If an oyster in which the embryos are in this condition is opened, there will be found upon its beard a slimy coating thickly loaded with grayish-blue granules. These granules are the embryo oysters, if a drop of the granular slime be placed in a dish with pure sea water, the young animals will soon separate from the mass, and spread swimming through the entire water. When the embryos are at this stage their number may be estimated in the following manner: The whole mass of embryos is carefully scraped from the beard of the mother oyster by means of a small hair brush. The whole mass is then weighed, and afterward a small portion of the mass. This small portion is then diluted with water or spirits of wine, and the embryos portioned out into a number of small glass dishes, so that they can be placed under the microscope and counted. Thus, knowing the weight of the small portion and the number of embryos in it by count, we can estimate the total number of embryos from the weight of the entire mass, which is also known. In this manner I estimated the number of embryos in each of five full grown Schleswig-Holstein oysters caught in August, 1869, and found that the average number was 1,012,956.

Notwithstanding this great fecundity, but an extremely small proportion of the young oysters produced during the course of the summer arrive at maturity, 421 only out of 500,000,000 escaping destruction. The immolation of a vast number of young germs is the means by which nature secures to a few germs the certainty of arriving at maturity. In order to render the ideas of germ-fecundity and productiveness more easily understood, Prof. Mobius makes the following comparison between the oyster and man:

According to Wappaus, for every 1,000 men there are 347 births. According to Bockh, out of every 1,000 men born 554 arrive at maturity, that is, live to be twenty years or more of age; thus, on an average, 347 children are produced from 554 mature men, or 626 children from 1,000 mature men. Since 1,000 full-grown oysters produce 440,000,000 of germs, then the germ fecundity of the oyster is to the germ fecundity of man as 440,000,000 to 6.26, or as 7,028,754 to 1. On the other hand, the number which arrive at maturity is 579,002 times as great with mankind as with the oyster; for of 1,000 human embryos brought into the world 554 arrive at maturity, or of 440,000,000 newly born 243,760,000 would live to grow up, while of 440,000,000 young oysters only 421 ever become capable of propagating their species. The proportion is then 421 to 243,760,000, or as 1 to 579,002. I am fully persuaded that these figures represent the number of oysters which arrive at maturity more favorably than is really the case, since from every thousand of full grown oysters it is certain that, on an average, more than 440,000,000 young are produced.

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RED SKY.

The beautiful red sky which has been so frequent of late, morning as well as evening, has excited much comment. The comment, however, has consisted more of description, statement of fact, theory, and wonder as to cause, rather than as to satisfactory explanation.

Facts in the case which would reveal the secret of this beautiful display of nature are not complete and numerous enough at present to establish the cause of this phenomenon on a sure basis; yet enough facts, it would seem, have been obtained to satisfy the strong mind capable of bridging over a wide expanse.

Facts in an argument are like piers to a bridge-the more we have of them, c. p., the more substantial the structure. When the facts are _legion_, the structure becomes a causeway, and there is no need of argument.

Argument is a bridge--the fewer the facts, the more the necessity for the bridge; the less the facts, the more argument necessary to connect the few we have, and the more skill is required to make substantial connecting links between the few solid piers (facts) that exist.

One of the queer things in connection with this is, the public have looked chiefly, if not wholly, to the astronomers for an explanation of this phenomenon, when it is not their special province to explain matters in this department of nature.