EDITOR, CHAS. P. NEILL, COMMISSIONER. ASSOCIATE EDITORS, G. W. W. HANGER, CHAS. H. VERRILL, G. A. WEBER. II The new Russian Workingmen's Compensation Act, by I. M. Rubinow.... 955-959 Digest of recent reports of State bureaus of labor statistics: The Philippine dependency includes more than 1,700 islands, and is distributed over a water area of 832,968 square miles. An irregular line drawn to embrace the entire group presents an outline not unlike a pear, with the narrower portion to the north, near the twenty-first parallel of latitude, or approximately the same latitude as central Cuba. The broader southern portion touches the fifth parallel, opposite southern Venezuela and Colombia, and extends east and west through 10 degrees of longitude. The longest direct line that can be drawn between any two points in the archipelago, from the Batanes Islands, north of Luzon, to the Tawi Tawi group, just off the north coast of Borneo, represents a distance of 1,000 miles. If Manila were placed in the position of St. Louis, northern Luzon would extend through Illinois to the vicinity of Chicago, while the southern end of the same island would project in a narrow, irregular strip of land, to the neighborhood of Nashville; Mindanao would lie on the Gulf coast of Alabama and Florida; the Sulu group would extend nearly to Galveston, while nearly parallel and north of this archipelago Palawan and a few attendant islands would form a long index reaching into eastern and northern Texas. Were land communication perfected one. might ride by rail from the mouth of the Cagayán River, on the north coast of Luzon, through Sámar, Leyte, and Mindanao, to Zamboanga, nearly 1,200 miles, traversing the whole eastern limit of the archipelago, with only two water intervals that could not be bridged, and those comparatively narrow channels as easily ferried as the Strait of Mackinac. From the highlands of Leyte, Bohol and Cebú are visible |