to the Post Office Department. The service west of Chicago is not selfsupporting but is showing gradual improvement. The public is becoming more generous with air mail stamps. The transcontinental route will be leased or sold to private companies when they prove their ability to operate it, or it will become a part of the national airways system under the Department of Commerce. It would then be available to the public, corresponding to the Lincoln Highway-fields, lights, and auxiliary equipment maintained by the government for private machines.

Another reason for widespread encouragement among flyers has been Henry Ford's entrance into aviation.

Late in January contracts had been let by the Post Office Department for nine routes, all to be in operation by April. These routes are: New York, Hartford and Boston; Chicago, Springfield and St. Louis; Chicago, St. JɔOklaseph, Kansas City, Wichita, homa City, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas; Salt Lake City and Los Angeles; Elko (Nev.), Boise (Ida.) and Pasco (Wn.); Detroit and Cleveland; Detroit and Chicago; Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Other routes which are scheduled to be operating or well under way before this article is published include a line between Cleveland and Birmingham, taking in Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville; another between Atlanta, Jacksonville and Miami; another between Los Angeles and Kansas City; and another between Ohio and New Orleans. According to present indications, more than 100 planes will be carrying the mails on American air routes before the end of the summer. Each company receives a pro rata share of the receipts for special air mail postage at 10 cents an ounce.

That is only a beginning. At first the companies are planning to carry only the mail, gradually working into parcel post, which offers a wide and profitable field. Passenger carrying will follow.

Approximately 100 air transport companies are in process of organiza. tion in the United States. A third are financed by private subscription. Another third are proceeding on a shoestring, trusting to luck and future events to pull them through. The remaining 30, possibly more, are stockselling, blue-sky outfits that do not intend to operate and should be driven out of business before they unload their worthless shares on the public. There is little doubt that the history of commercial aviation will parallel that of surface transportation. Every medium from railroads to canals and ractor cars has claimed its share of sacrifices.

One hundred and ten cities are now preparing air harbors for the craft which they expect in the near future.

The uses for aircraft are amazing in their variety. One company alone is using 20 planes in "cotton dusting" to exterminate the boll weevil. It is officially estimated that the maximum use of planes for this purpose alone would save the cotton growers about $135,000,000 a year. The U. S. Topographic Survey plans to cover 44 per cent of its field work in 1926 by airplanes, with a saving to the government of about $9,000,000. Three of the larger aerial photographic companies aggregated nearly a million dollars in 1925. Other planes are flying in forest fire patrols, timber cruising, relief work, and in fact, all emergency duties where speed is essential.

This country is geographically fitted for air traffic on a scale impossible in Europe. Distances are vast. Unlike Europe's, our transportation does not radiate from one or two cities. There are about 50 centers, all important. Standards of living are higher here. More traveling is done per capita and more mail carried than anywhere else. With Federal supervision of civil aviation and with the general interest it is believed that we shall be able to maintain our lead in the air, chiefly because everybody now recognizes that it is possible for us to do it.

lings being burned to generate enough electricity to light and heat a city, to cut the logs in the forest, to hoist those logs on flat cars, to run those cars to the water front or mill, then to run a mill which yearly turns out enough lumber for 40,000 houses of five or six rooms-and all with less physical drudgery than the shifting of gears on a motor car.

One of the most marvelous operations is the sawing of the big timbers to boards in lengths of from 2 to 50 feet by a man who operates a switchboard as easily as one would run a typewriter but demanding concentration to the nth degree, and good judg ment to avoid waste.

But what I wanted to know was, how would the university graduate fare here.

"In the first place, we employ no unskilled men here," said the manager. "We can't afford them. We employ the last word in machinery to do the drudgery and increase the output; but we must always have the man with the trained mind to think for the machine. He must be master of the machine. He must be its brains.

"He must think as quickly as the machine acts; and he must have good judgment to handle it to prevent waste in length, cut, thickness, character of the board, grain of the wood, discard knot holes, snip off slightly decayed or water-spoiled ends and that sort of thing. The first requirement of a good operative in the new electric mechanics is that he must have brains to think for the machines."

"Then good-by old bunk houses with straw beds and pork and beans. You'll have to supply college dormitories and modern hotels and hospitals-"

"Go out and see them," said the manager.

I did. I found the workers' inns clean, modern, scientific as a hospital. In two great mill centers visited, there was a bathroom between each two bedrooms. There were libraries. There were pool and billiard rooms

and swimming pools and tennis courts and radios and phonographs and dance halls and athletic departments.

I also found where many of the women graduates are absorbed. I found them in the scientific kitchens -only they didn't call them "maids." They were "diet specialists." I found them in the libraries, in the hospitals, in the community houses acting ostensibly as entertainers but really as mentors. These conditions are more general than exceptional from the paper mills and lumber mills in the hinterlands of James Bay to the big timbers of Northern British Columbia and Washington and Oregon.

The last day I was in Longview was the end of the university year; and in that week came university graduates from as far south as Missouri, and as far north as Canada, seeking manual jobs; and 70 had been placed in one day. The minimum wage was $100 a month. The highest placed was a technical chap at $300-as much as the governors of some states get today..

Consider what the machine is doing today. The self-binder drawn by a tractor will cut 40 acres in ten hours, or what formerly required the backbreaking work of 40 men for 16 hours a day, for rich crops know no union hours.

One signal on a rail track today replaces the labor of seven, and though you may howl over the displaced seven men, also think of the lone lantern man in wintry blizzards at 40 degrees below.

I saw on the Pacific, salmon brought in, which were cleaned, cut, cooked, canned, sealed and put on a vessel ready for shipment within one half hour from the time the fish were tossed up from the nets, uncontaminated by a human hand after the first toss. I saw the same thing with strawberries after the first hand-picking and hulling.

Yes, the curse is being taken off labor, as President Suzzalo said.

Having settled the proper kind and amount of our mental food, it remains that we should be careful to allow proper intervals between meal and meal, and not swallow the food hastily without mastication, so that it may be thoroughly digested; both which rules, for the body, are also applicable at once to the mind.

First, as to the intervals: these are as really necessary as they are for the body, with this difference only, that while the body requires three or four hours' rest before it is ready for another meal, the mind will in many cases do with three or four minutes. I believe that the interval required is much shorter than is generally supposed, and from personal experience, I would recommend anyone, who has to devote several hours together to one subject of thought, to try the effect of such a break, say once an hour, leaving off for five minutes only each time, but taking care to throw the mind absolutely "out of gear" for those five minutes, and to turn it entirely to other subjects. It is astonishing what an amount of impetus and elasticity the mind recovers during those short periods of rest.

And then, as to the mastication of the food, the mental process answering to this is simply thinking over what we read. This is a very much greater exertion of mind than the mere passive taking in the contents of our Author. So much greater an exertion is it, that we are far too apt to neglect it altogether, and go on pouring in fresh food on the top of the undigested masses already lying there, till the unfortunate mind is fairly swamped under the flood. But the greater the exertion the more valuable, we may be sure, is the effect. One hour of steady thinking over a subject is worth two or three of reading only.

And just consider another effect of this thorough digestion of the books we read; I mean the arranging and "ticketing," so to speak, of the subjects in our minds, so that we can readily refer to them when we want them. Many a man hurries through book after book, without waiting to digest or arrange anything. A wellread man, on the other hand, is he who has sorted his knowledge into properly ticketed bundles; who thinks over what he reads, questions or confirms it through reflection, and associates it with other related informa tion or ideas already on file in his own mind.

Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his very amusing book, The Professor at the Breakfast Table, gives the follow ing rule for knowing whether a hu man being is young or old: "The crucial experiment is this offer a bulky bun to the suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner. If this is easily accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established." He tells us that a human being, "if young, will eat anything at any hour of the day or night."

To ascertain the healthiness of the mental appetite of a human animal, place in its hands a short, well-written, but not exciting treatise on some popu lar subject-a mental bun, in fact. if it is read with eager interest and per fect attention, and if the reader can answer questions on the subject afterwards, the mind is in first-rate work. ing order. If it be politely laid down again, or perhaps lounged over for a few minutes, and then, "I can't read this stupid book! Would you hand me the second volume of The Mysterious Murder?" you may be equally sure that there is something wrong in the mental digestion.