Familiar Sight Research Articles

Trends in Municipal Government in the South

Municipal government in the South is no longer the concern of a few as it was not so many years ago.' In an area which has been, and to a considerable extent still is, strongly rural and agrarian in thought and practice, the twin facts of the increase in the number of cities and the concentration of urban population in emerging metropolitan districts have hastened the changes in the pattern of local government. Increasingly the governmental needs of many sections of the South require the attention of city rather than rural government. If an observer of the municipal scene had arranged to space his travels in the early or middle thirties and today, he would be confronted on his second visit with both familiar and changed conditions. He would find, for example, that the answer to the question where the city was going to get the money was as hard and, to municipal councils and administrators, as cruel a question as it had been in the past. Obstacles to municipal fiscal freedom would still be found in state constitutions and statutes. Economy and efficiency would still be staples of conversation, especially among taxpayers before city councils when additional or increased taxes were being considered, and our observer would notice the familiar sight, as he had earlier, of some of the most vociferous objectors appearing the next day at the city hall and demanding increased municipal expenditures for one of their pet projects. (For one verbal symbol, however, our observer would listen in vain; that ominous word retrenchment had disappeared, even if only temporarily, from the municipal lexicon.) If municipal abstinence to achieve survival was the order of the day in the early thirties, however, our observer would find that current municipal revenues and expenditures were

VI.—On the Occurrence of Submerged Forests in certain Inland Lakes in Donegal

For many years past the Swedish geologists have been directing the attention of the scientific world to the curious phenomenon of the occurrence of submerged forests in certain of their inland lakes. In our own country such evidences of change of level are a familiar sight along our sea-coasts, and, if we bear in mind the extreme instability of the sea-level, their presence is little to be wondered at. In all bodies of water which hare no outlet—and the sea is only the largest of these—the surface-level is determined by the balance between supply and evaporation, and oscillation is inevitable. In the case of freshwater lakes, however, the level is determined within small limits by the overflow, and the occurrence of tree stumps in the position of growth beneath their waters presents therefore a problem of considerable interest.