There is no lack of ways and means; the problem is simple and easily solved; nay--a not very extensive search through the Patent Office records will show that it has been solved already; perhaps not in the most practical and perfect manner, but still solved so well, as, were it not for corporation cupidity, would greatly add to the comfort and safety of passengers. The real problem is how to compel corporations to recognize the fact that the public has rights they are bound to respect. It is the disregard of these rights that fills our cars with smoke, dust, and exhalations, and puts box stoves full of hot coals in the corners, ready to cook the human stew whenever a frisky car shall take a notion to turn a somersault. The invention needed is a conscience for corporations--an invention, by the way, scarcely less difficult than the one advertised for in our last issue, namely, a plan for preventing the sale of intoxicating liquors and tobacco in New Jersey. The _Railroad Gazette_, imitating the English ideal of prolixity in discussion, for which _Engineering_ has recently patted it on the back approvingly, treats us, in its issue of February 11th, to a page article, to be continued, under the title of "Warming and Ventilation of Railroad Cars." In this article the writer takes the ground that people in general are ignorant of the effects of pure air, and not being able to "see the foulness," they "therefore do not believe it exists." It is quite possible they may not be able to see the foulness, but if in the majority of railroad cars run in this country, they are not able to feel it in gritty, grimy accumulations on skin and linen, and smell it in suffocating stenches which serve, with sneeze-provoking dust, to stifle anything like comfort, their skin must be thicker, their linen more neglected, and their noses less sensitive than those of the majority of fellow travellers it has been our fortune to be cooped up with for a day's railroad journey. The _Railroad Gazette_ makes this wholesale charge of ignorance and insensibility the excuse for an essay on the physiology of respiration, mostly extracted from Huxley's "Elementary Lessons in Physiology," and therefore excellent in its way, though having a somewhat remote bearing upon the subject as announced in the title of the article. We trust that before this journal concludes its series of articles thus commenced, it will tell how to breathe into the breasts of the corporations which choke us in their human packing boxes, something resembling the soul which they are universally acknowledged to be destitute of. When this is done, carbonic acid, ammoniacal smells, organic exhalations, smoke, and dust, will be invited to shun the interiors of railway cars, and comparative comfort will descend upon the peregrinating public. * * * * * THE MINERAL RESOURCES OF MISSOURI.