Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1916 — PERILS OF NATURE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PERILS OF NATURE

By DR. SAMUEL G. DIXON. Commissioner of Health of Pennsylvania. Our streams, once undefiled by man, ran from the mountains to the sea in

all of nature’s purity. They ran through our valleys and meadows in all their pristine beauty and offered to all animate nature that which would innocently quench the thirst of man and beast and help them live. Today it is not so.

In that with which nature has endowed much of our territory more richly tfiau many other countries, we now find lurking poison so hidden, that in some cases it is to be seen o&ly by the aid of the microscope. In the season when we travel through the country to be happy and lay up energy and strength for the toil of the coming winter, the* want of intelligence and care makes us deaf to the teaching of preventive medicine, and we quench our thirst at the stream we run across, regardless of its purity, and often the sparkling tumbler of water Is only to be compared with the draught of the deadly hemlock. The parched lips have been moistened and the thirst satisfied, but