LETTERS AND ART.

AN INVASION OF VIRILITY IN ENGLISH
LITERATURE.

LACKING an academy of literature to set and maintain a high

standard of literary taste, laments Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, we tend to be dominated by clamorous schools of ready writers. The two tendencies at present most noticeable among the younger writers, he goes on to say, are the antiethical tendency and the virile tendency. While to regard art from the purely ethical point of view is cramping and narrowing, to exclude the ethical point of view is no less cramping, argues Mr. Benson, since the ethical emotion is one of the vital emotions of humanity. The antiethical point of view, he maintains, is illiberal, and is in reality only a protest against the widespread success of productions which have a purely ethical motif. More dangerous, he asserts, is the virile point of view," because it would exclude from the domain of art many of the best qualities of art, the tender, quiet, secret emotions, on the presence of which much of the best permanent art depends." English literary art, says this writer, has lately, and much to its detriment, been violently invaded by this spirit, which has its votaries among the critics as well as among the writers. Of this type of critic we read (in The National Review, London):

But the world would be a very uninteresting place if it were entirely peopled by such individualities. Meanwhile, the other type -the peaceful, contemplative, retired artists-hardly get a hearing. It is like the suspension of the talk of sensible persons which takes place when some healthy, complacent, and outspoken child is produced for inspection and admiration.

"At the present time it seems as tho the hearts of men were turned from these things to the noise of cities, the heated talk of clubrooms, the rattle of motors, the roar of railway-trains, the

spread of imperialistic ideas, the spin and speed of wars. Yet this is in reality a relapse into barbarism; it is a revolt of primitive nature, of animal impulses, against civilization, against refinement. Those who believe that the world is moving toward simplicity and peace, and that in tranquil joys, settled labor, the stillness of the countryside, lie the real and permanent joys of life, will oppose a quiet and serene resistance to these tumultuous and restless forces."

Mr. Benson would not wish that such a point of view should be suppressed or excluded, since "anything which can enlarge the horizon of art is desirable." But he maintains that the truer function of art is "to disentangle the finer shades of emotion, to give expression to the remote, the subtle, rather than to the commonplace and the obvious." The work of art is to capture these fine essences, he tells us, to hear dying echoes, to see and interpret the quieter beauties of earth on the one hand-the moonrise over still pastures, the murmur of hidden streams, the voices of birds in the thickets, the smoldering sunset; and then to express with due restraint the richer unspoken emotions of the heart, the mysteries that surround us, the tender relationships of human beings, the strangeness of the complex world."

"The virile critic would have every one to be of a swashbuckling type, fond of his glass and of the girls. He echoes the sentiment of Bottom in the 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.' He would have writers to be always tearing cats. Such a critic, in reviewing a book of subtle and restrained emotions, will say: 'I don't want this kind of thing at all; I want something larger and more generous, to set my blood a-tingle-something to fight and struggle with; never mind a tumble or two, so long as one gets a sense of life.' He would

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THE BROWNINGS' ROMANCE AS REFLECTED IN THEIR POETRY.

undignified, noisy, with a pleasant sense of courage, a desire to tread on other people's toes, and to shout 'Bo' in the ears of geese."

The disciples of the virile school, says Mr. Benson, would maintain" that vividness, loudness, and decision are the permanent qualities in art; that there is no such thing as tradition and authority at all; that art is not a church, but a system of congregationalism." Of those writers whom the virile critic acclaims and encourages Mr. Benson goes on to say:

"The virile person, determined to have the best of everything, has realized that he has certain emotions, which it gives him pleasure to express, and which he conceives to be artistic. The result is that, seeing that there is a brotherhood of art, which has a certain influence on the world, he is resolved to be inside it, and communicate a pleasant stir to it. And so, as in the symposium of Plato, a noisy and turbulent invasion has taken place. The revelers who rush in have a certain vigor, a free humor, a definite picturesqueness. But, as in the case of the kingdom of heaven, the violent have taken the domain of art by force, to the annoyance and regret of more quiet-minded persons.

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The boisterous, joyful, good-humored, high-spirited temperament, which is fashionable now in art, has a right to be considered, no doubt; but the appropriate setting for such natures is real life; when they become self-conscious, and look at themselves in the mirror, admire the evidences of health and activity, and set to work to talk about themselves, one feels that there is something amiss; they stretch out their legs, and pat their thighs in public, and the result is that they attract a good deal of attention.

direct references to each other made by the Brownings in their poems adds timeliness to its interest from the fact that we are within a few months of the one-hundredth anniversary of Mrs. Browning's birth. Mr. Gilder points out that "one of the most exquisite love-histories of which the world has knowledge" was immortally sung on Mrs. Browning's part in the " Sonnets from the Portuguese," 'Life and Love," A Denial," "Proof and Disproof," " Question and Answer," "Inclusion," and "Insufficiency "; and on Mr. Browning's in " One Word More," "Prospice," and the passage beginning "O Lyric Love," from "The Ring and the Book."

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The marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett has been described as the most perfect example of wedded happiness in the history of literature." While their poetic and literary lives were to a large degree separate and independent, as Mr. Browning says, their heart was one with pulse that beat double." To further quote Mr. Gilder, who writes in The Century (New York, October):

"A poet has said that as for Browning's love for his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance. It is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either.' True; yet the lives of the two as poets make the story what it is. Their lives, indeed, were poems, as Milton said poets' lives should be, and their poetry was their life, as Mrs. Browning said should also be true of poets. The world could spare neither the lives nor the poems, and especially would it be j e-poor without

Mrs. Browning expressed her own feelings with regard to the man she loved in a series of inimitable poems, " Sonnets from the Portuguese," which her husband afterward pronounced "the finest sonnets in any language since Shakespeare's." She, however, never intended them for publication. How they came into her husband's hands is thus related in the article above referred to:

"It was during their residence in Pisa, early in 1847, that Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese,' as the poet Edmund Gosse has told by authority of Browning himself. Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write alone, and not to show each other what they had written. This was a rule which he sometimes broke through, but she never. He had the habit of working in a down-stairs room, where their meals were spread, while Mrs. Browning studied in a room on the floor above. One, day, early in 1847, their breakfast being over, Mrs. Browning went up-stairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared. He was presently aware of some one behind him, altho the servant was gone. It was Mrs. Browning, who held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at her, and at the

and exact description and autobiographical confessions begin. Of this we may be sure, that the imagination of Browning was immeasurably enriched by his relation to his wife, and by her personality and her art, as in like manner was her imagination by him: and that in one poem, his longest, The Ring and the Book,' her influence was direct and dominating."

ITALIAN OPERAS ON ORIENTAL-AMERICAN THEMES.

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EALISM and modernity are the distinguishing traits of the young Italian school of operatic composers, and these qualities, with others equally striking, are conspicuous in two new works produced at the recent opera season in London. Both received high praise from the critics, and one, indeed, was spoken of as the only novelty of consequence of the operatic year. This was Puccini's" Madama Butterfly," which failed in Milan last year, but which has been revised, rewritten, and so improved that it is practically a different work. Its success in London, where it was sung several times, was pronounced, and great popularity is predicted for it in all the music centers of the world.

"These 'Sonnets,' in their profound vision, their flaming sincerity, the eloquence with which they express the utter self-abnegation no less than the self-assertion of genuine love, transcend the distinctions of sex and proclaim authentically not only the woman's part, but, also, that which is common, in the master passion, to both woman and man."

Browning, altho previously to the Pisa incident he did not know 'that his friend was constantly expressing her intimate thought of him in verse," three weeks before their first meeting made a promise to "write verse to her "some day." Only one poem has been identified as positively written by Browning to his wife during her lifetime. In Mr. Gilder's words:

"One Word More' is the only poem written during his wife's lifetime that is openly addressed to her by Browning. How much of his wife, and of his experience as her lifelong lover, went into his poetry it would be impossible accurately to detect and measure. So elusive are the workings of the artist's mind, so replete with suggestions and analogies are the poet's dreams, so full of meaning within meaning may be the images and symbols of poetry, it would be idle to endeavor to determine where invention, ends

An American naval officer, Sir [?] Francis Blummy Pinkerton, while visiting Japan falls in love with a Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San. He marries her in native fashion, which, as an American, he does not consider to be really and permanently binding. On the other hand, the Japanese girl becomes attached to American ideas and

wishes to be regarded as an American citizen by virtue of her marriage. Some years pass; a child is born to Madama Butterfly, and Pinkerton, who had returned to America, is expected back. Madama Butterfly anxiously awaits him and adorns the child while watching for the appearance of the war-ship commanded by its father.

Unfortunately, Pinkerton has married another woman, an American, having regarded the Japanese bond as dissolvable at his pleasure. He no longer cares for Madama Butterfly, and this, with the arrival of the American wife, drives the poor butterfly to suicide.

Before committing the act of self-destruction, Madama Butterfly sets the three-year-old baby on the floor, blindfolds it, and puts the American flag in its hands. In the final, harrowing scene the child, unconscious of the tragedy taking place, waves the American. flag in amusement.

The London critics find much beauty and charm in the score, as well as pathos and emotion. The Times's musical reviewer says of the opera:

"Like all that he [Puccini] writes, the music is original, characteristic, and distinguished; local color, as has been said, is largely used, and the composer has contrived to bring in Japanese inter-vals of melody, not merely as curiosities, but as really conveying:

the expression of genuine emotion. Not only in the prominent scenes that have been referred to, but at innumerable points throughout the work this is the case. It is curious to recognize a Japanese theme that has been familiar in England ever since the date of 'The Mikado.' At the climax of the whole, another native tune is heard without disguise of any kind. It is admirably scored throughout, and it is perfectly written for the voices. A peculiarly happy touch is the use of little gongs in the marriage scene, and in the second act there are various imitations of the effect of Japanese instruments. The little tune that Madama Butterfly sings to the baby, and the tenderly expressive number in which a chorus outside sings a melody of possibly genuine Japanese origin, while the women are keeping their watch, are two of the most charming things in the score. This, the first scene of Act II., is the most beautiful section of the work. It is not by any means the only striking moment in the opera; the charming loveduet with which the first act ends is masterly in conception and, like all the rest, exhibits a rare and perfect use of local color' that never becomes obtrusive, yet always expresses the emotions of the Japanese personages in what we feel to be a Japanese way. As might be guessed the Americans are less realistically treated; they sing music that could only come out of Italian mouths, and even the well-known tune The Star-Spangled Banner' is transformed into an Italian melody. Another beautiful moment, perhaps the finest in the work, is where Madama Butterfly and her attendant strew the floor with flower-petals, singing the while a strange sequence of harmonies which are justified by the composer's skill, and which create a haunting impression of beauty."

...

The other new Italian work referred to above was Franco Leoni's "L'Oracolo," an extremely dramatic one-act opera founded on Mr. Fernald's once famous little melodrama, "The Cat and the Cherub," which had long "runs in American theaters. It is a picture of Chinese life in San Francisco, and achieved a striking success. Signor Leoni's score is distinctly realistic, recalling Mascagni's and Leoncavallo's style. There are interesting melodies and effective choruses in the work, and some novel features in the way of orchestration and tone-color. It was well received.

THAT

THE IRONY OF ANATOLE FRANCE. HAT Mr. Anatole France, who is considered the most eminent living French writer, should have an enthusiastic following among the English impresses Mr. Edmund Gosse as something of a paradox, inasmuch as the supreme literary trait possessed by Mr. France is irony; and irony, according to Mr. Gosse, is anathema to the Engish reader. In his lately published volume, "French Profiles," Mr. Gosse describes the author of "La Vie Littéraire as the most entertaining intelligence at this moment working in the world of letters," and asserts, moreover, that he "indicates a direction of European feeling, a mood of European thought." He goes on to explain that in his representative capacity Mr. France exhibits the weariness "of all the moral effort that was applied to literature in the eighties, all the searchings into theories and proclaimings of gospels, all the fuss and strain of Ibsen, and Tolstoy and Zola." Mr. France, continues the writer, is what they used to call a Pyrrhonist in the seventeenth century-“ a skeptic, one who doubts whether it is worth while to struggle insanely against the trend of things." The fact, however, that he had predecessors of such "moral strenuousness" as those here mentioned is imputed to him by the present writer as an asset of great value. He" would not be so delicately balanced, so sportive, so elegantly and wilfully unattached to any moral system, if he had not been preceded by masters of such a gloomy earnestness." While crediting Mr. France with an exceptional measure of lucidity and gentleness and charm, Mr. Gosse insists that "he is primarily, is almost exclusively, an ironist." To quote :

"The irony of M. Anatole France, like that of Renan, and to a much larger degree, is beneficent. It is a tender and consolatory raillery, based upon compassion. His greatest delight is found in observing the inconsistencies, the illusions of human life, but never

are SO

for the purpose of wounding us in them, or with them. His genius is essentially benevolent and pitiful. This must not, however, blind us to the fact that he is an ironist, and perhaps the most original in his own sphere who has ever existed. Unless we see this plainly, we are not prepared to comprehend him at all, and if our temperaments Anglo-Saxon as to be impervious to this form of approach, we shall do best to cease to pretend that we appreciate M. Anatole France.

"Over and over again he has preached that intelligence is vanity, that the more we know about life the less we can endure the anguish of its impact. He says somewhere-is it not in 'Le Lys Rouge '?-that the soul of man feeds on chimeras. Take this fabulous nourishment from us, and you spread the banquet of science before us in vain. We starve in the insufficiency of a diet which has been deprived of all our absurd traditional errors. It is strange that all the subtlety of this marvelous brain should have found

ANATOLE FRANCE,

Described by Mr. Gosse as "the most entertaining intelligence at this moment working in the world of letters."

its way back to the axiom, 'Unless ye become as little children, ye can not enter into the kingdom of heaven.'"

It is doubtful if the vogue of Anatole France is very widespread in America. Still it may be of interest to note Mr. Gosse's words in relation to the great French ironist's English admirers, and the mental habits hitherto employed toward that literary instrument of which he is proclaimed the supreme master. His English admirers are to be found, says Mr. Gosse, among the intelligent part of the English public who have taken their cue from "a few expert persons whose views are founded on principle and reason." Mr. Gosse felicitates this small section of the Engilsh public on their accessibility to such influence, but is lost in a certain wonder how it can be, since in the literary decalogue of the English reader the severest prohibition is "Thou shalt not commit irony!" He points out that no one who has endeavored in the last hundred years to use irony in England as an imaginative medium has escaped failure. He does not offer an explanation of this fact beyond venturing the speculation that the nation was wounded so deeply by the sarcastic pen of Swift "that it has suspected ever since, in every ironic humorist,' the smiler with the knife. There is no great compliment paid to the intelligence of Mr. France's English admirers in the following:

"The intelligent part of the English public has been successfully dragooned into the idea that M. Anatole France is the most ingenious of the younger writers of Europe. It is extraordinary, but very fortunate, that the firm expression of an opinion on the part of a few expert persons whose views are founded on principle and reason still exercises a very great authority on the better class of readers. When it ceases to do so the reign of chaos will have set in. However, it is for the present admitted in this country that M. Anatole France, not merely is not as the Georges Ohnets are, but that he is a great master of imagination and style. Yet one can but wonder how many of his dutiful English admirers really enjoy his books-how many, that is to say, go deeper down than the epigrams and the picturesqueness; how many perceive, in colloquial phrase, what it is he is driving at,' and, having perceived, still admire and enjoy. It is not so difficult to understand that there are English people who appreciate the writings of Ibsen and Tolstoy, and even, to sink fathoms below these, of D'Annunzio,

because altho all these are exotic in their relation to our national habits of mind, they are direct. But Anatole France-do his Engish admirers realize what a heinous crime he commits?-for all his lucidity and gentleness and charm, Anatole France is primarily, he is almost exclusively, an ironist."

WH

THE NEMESIS OF BERNARD SHAW.

WHILE the vogue of Bernard Shaw in America is at its height, the critics are preparing us for a reaction. "Man and Superman,' writes Mr. Austin Lewis in The Overland Monthly, "marks at one and the same time his climax as a writer and the probable conclusion of his influence as a molder of opinion." The Theatre (New York) labels Mr. Shaw as “a menace to morals," and urges that, while he is "not a small man," his greatness consists in "that which he professes to despise-technical dramatic ability, not in philosophy, except in minor satire." "We've stayed behind the absolute truth of his cleverness too long," writes Mr. Montrose J. Moses in Town and Country; we now ask for the

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soul structure of the man who chuckles at us from over the footlights; who strokes us with a grater; who, as Huneker says, bathes humanity in muriatic acid and deceives us into laughing while we squirm." But if the point made by Mr. Lewis is well taken, the "soul structure" of the man is the very thing we are not to have revealed to us. Shaw "has no logical path of escape from the jaws of the dragon created by his own infernal cleverness." Says Mr. Lewis further:

"Mr. Shaw, by his ostentatious elimination of emotion, has placed himself in a position from which extrication must be difficult, if not impossible. A philosopher may be superior to emotions, or inferior, which is perhaps nearer the truth, but an artist can never be so, and Mr. Shaw chooses to appeal to us as an artist. He is thus driven, perforce, to that most barren of fields, literary art, for the sake of literary art. But Mr. Shaw does not really want to be a literary artist-he uses the art medium as a means of dosing us with philosophy, and that is all. He despises art and artists, and gives his grounds in a fashion which makes dissent from him difficult. What, then, is left to him, except to continue his lamentations over the weakness and folly of his fellow-men, and to long, artistically, but, in the very nature of things, vainly, for the Superman?"

Continuing the list of Shaw's inabilities Mr. Lewis writes:

"He longs to be a leader. . . . But to lead is precisely the one thing of which he is incapable. Men will have none of his leadership; they think him too good a joke to lose. They laugh at him, applaud him, pat him on the back, shout to him to turn another somersault, and, when he has anticked, look at one another, wink solemnly, and whisper,' Punchinello.'

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"In spite of all his apparent cynicism, perhaps, indeed, because of it, Mr. Shaw is at the bottom a very altruistic person. He wants to see the race progress, and he would be willing to make almost any personal sacrifice to push it forward even a little. In fact, in his Man and Superman' he shows an entire willingness to sacrifice humanity for the sake of a future humanity, always provided, however, that such a future evolution of the race should correspond with the ideas of Mr. Shaw as they happen to be today.

"But, unfortunately, he has learned to despise humanity. His ambitions for the race are so high that men and women appear to him to be very crude instruments for the accomplishment of human betterment. Yet he is as well aware as the rest of us that men must accomplish the destiny of man, and that no deus ex machina can be counted on to perform the work. He says: 'All human progress involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts himself to conditions; the fool is the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself.' This view puts him at odds with a contradiction which must necessarily have destroyed him and which, as a matter of fact, has done so.

with the same idle purpose of the small boy who applies a match to the back stairs of a tenement-house to see the engines run. Mr. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., in his "Dramatists of To-day," is another critic who emphasizes the idea of a reaction following the first charm of Shaw's brilliancy. After ascribing to him a supremacy, in certain respects, over his brothers of the craft, Mr. Hale goes on to describe the passing of the spell by which, for a time, this scintillant Irishman captures his public. We read:

“Realistic brilliancy is the great thing about Mr. Shaw. For the moment I think everything else becomes dull and tawny beside his white light. Pinero seems to be the merest boy, smoking cigarettes and talking of things that he knows as much about as the rabbit does of the purposes of nature. Sudermann is evidently one who makes not even an effort to see beneath the crust of custom and convention of a thousand years. Hauptmann, with all his brilliancy, is merely the bright child who amuses you by telling how he gets the better (or else doesn't) of oppressive elders, a jampot rebel against meat and potatoes. Rostand is the painter of very exquisite and charming pictures to illustrate Jack-and-theBeanstalk and other such classics. This man, on the other hand, has had life under his microscope and knows its secrets, has put himself in touch with real scientists who know the constitution of the universe, and now presents to us, with the sugar-coating that we demand, a few of the ultimate facts of life, that we may like or dislike, understand or not, but which are facts."

The above Mr. Hale describes as the more or less inevitable "first impression " derived from reading or seeing one of Shaw's plays. "Not that one will necessarily admire him or care about his ideas, but it seems very hard to deny them entirely or to get round them and him. You are on his side throughout the play, even if, when it is over, you are astonished to find what company you have been keeping." After the spell has passed, second thoughts, he avers, will quite as inevitably be something different. "The particular change that comes over one in regard to Mr. Shaw is that his white light loses brilliancy, and perhaps goes out. That is to say, shortly after you have been decidedly under the influence of his brilliancy, his cleverness, his realities, you find yourself not quite sure just what those ideas were that so short a time ago seemed, if not indubitable, yet at least absolutely there."

Mentality of the German Press. Before Prince Henry visited the United States he was warned by his brother, the German Emperor, that he must treat the newspaper men with more consideration than in Germany, as in America they "rank with major-generals." This incident is recalled to mind on reading an article by Mr. Rowland Strong on The Mentality of the German Press." Mr. Strong, writing in the London Outlook, states that those who know Germany only through her literature, her scientific achievements, her commercial efforts, her eminence in certain artistic spheres, "can have but a small conception of the childish credulity with which the average German mind will accept almost any tale, so long as it has the authority of the printed word or the newspaper behind it." And a newspaper, he adds, necessarily reflects in a certain measure the mentality of its readers. Mr. Strong professes to discover, in the Berliner in particular, an innate love of the marvelous and the scandalous. The combination of vanity and credulity which belongs, he alleges, to the German public, and which is reflected in the German press, "suggests a semibarbaric state of mind." This suggestion, he continues, “is borne out by other peculiarities which seem to place the modern Germans, apart altogether from their indisputably great national qualities, on a slightly lower scale of civilized refinement than the other Western nations."

WE learn from the London Academy that the University of Jena has established a new precedent for universities by the appointment of a professor of Dramaturgy, that is, "of the science of drama and of dramatic art." The ap pointee is Dr. Hugo Dinger.

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SLEEPING SICKNESS SOLVED.

TH

`HE mysterious and fatal “sleeping sickness" or " lethargy " of Central Africa, from which no victim has yet escaped, is now definitely known to be due to a blood parasite, conveyed to the body by the bite of a fly, and finally reaching the brain. This discovery has been made by a British government commission that has been working on the problem since 1902. Its head, Col. D. Bruce, had previously solved the mystery of the tsetse fly's fatal bite, which he proved to owe its dangerous results also to the communication of an organism to the blood of bitten cattle or other animals. Says an editorial writer in Engineering (London, October 6), describing the methods and results of Colonel Bruce:

"There were many features suggesting a fly-borne disease. With the assistance of the native authorities, he collected all the insects of the district, carefully keeping those from different localities separate, and studying their habits. A species of Glossina, the Glossina palpalis, was soon singled out as the most likely carrier of the sleeping sickness, and maps were prepared marking the spots in red or blue at which the fly occurred or did not occur, and other similar maps, showing the distribution of the sleeping sick

ness.

When superposed, the two maps were found to be in good agreement. Thus it was ascertained that the sleeping sickness is chiefly prevalent in the jungles on the banks of rivers and lakes; the fly does not voluntarily move for more than a few hundred yards from these jungles. Many natives in these districts were found to be suffering from infection by Trypanosoma gambiense. Flies feeding on those natives infected monkeys on which they were allowed to bite in the course of weeks or months. The length of the period after which the protozoan will make its appearance in the inoculated monkey depends upon the time which has passed since the fly took up the trypanosoma from an infected animal. If more than 48 hours intervene, no infection takes place. The infected monkeys suffered in all respects like men; they fell into the same listless lethargy and became prone to all sorts of diseases. Most of these tsetse flies, captured in districts infected with the disease, were proved carriers of the disease. There was, thus, no doubt left as to the direct connection of both the Glossina palpalis and the Trypanosoma gambiense with sleeping sickness.

'The full course of the sickness is not cleared up yet, however. The fly sucks up the protozoan with the blood of the animal it bites. The protozoan passes into the stomach of the fly, and out again through the proboscis together with the saliva. Whether the fly itself suffers, as the anopheles, the carrier of malaria, appears to do, is not settled. In the blood of the infected man the protozoan multiplies, but not necessarily to any great extent. The victim hardly feels any pain on being bitten, and for one, two, and even three years no wrong may be suspe.ted; for it is only when the protozoan reaches the cerebrospinal canal that characteristic symptoms are observed. The blood-vessels of the brain then become obstructed, so that the brain is no longer nourished. The lymphatic glands of the neck, particularly, also become affected."

So far, we are told, the disease has proved absolutely fatal, altho arsenic promises some chance of relief. More than one hundred thousand people succumbed to the sickness in Uganda from 1901 to 1904, and the majority of the people in the infected districts appear to be doomed. That most of the vicitms are natives is due to the fact that they expose themselves freely to the fly and refuse to believe its bite dangerous. Says the writer:

"It is not to be wondered at that they will not believe in the fatality of a fly-bite which they do not mind at the time, and which is not supposed to act until years afterward. The natives of the shores and numerous islands of the Victoria Nyanza, which is shallow in those parts, dangle their legs in the warm water, and do not trouble to brush away the fly which settles on their limbs. The white man is more careful, of course. The administrator of the district had all the jungle surrounding his house cut down, and the whole house made mosquito- and fly-proof. That precaution can not everywhere be applied in its full extent; but it is satisfactory to know that it is effective. What is to become of the poor

native, who, even when alive to the danger, is too weak to ward off the flies which are eager to feed upon him, is hard to say. There seems to be no help whatever for him. Isolation would be no use in these cases, unless vigorously applied in the sense that the natives of an infected locality are forbidden to leave their district lest they should feed flies not, so far, infected. Such a quarantine has been persisted in, but only in cases where medical science could reasonably do something for the imprisoned patients. In this instance the doctors are, so far, powerless."

THE

DOES ELECTROCUTION KILL?

HE question of the propriety of putting criminals to death by electric shock, which was discussed with acrimony and even violence at the time when the method was first introduced in the State of New York, has been revived in medical journals by the report of certain experiments on rabbits made by Dr. Louise Robinovitch, who draws from them conclusions adverse to the method of electrocution as at present practised. These experiments, which were first described in The Journal of Mental Pathology, are discussed editorially in The Medical Record (New York, September 30), which notes that altho" the chair" has for nearly two decades been the legal mode of execution of criminals in New York it has by no means received the unanimous approval even of those who believe in capital punishment. The writer goes on:

'The statement that death by means of an electric current of high voltage is practically instantaneous and painless has not been accepted by all who have studied the subject or witnessed an electrocution. If muscular contractions and cardiac pulsation are accepted signs of continued life, it is very certain that death is not instantaneous in all cases; and, indeed, in certain instances there has been a strong suspicion that the real executioner was the physician who performed the autopsy after life was assumed to be extinct. Whether the method is painless or not depends upon whether consciousness is at once abolished; and that is a point which is naturally very difficult to determine in the electric chair."

The writer then refers to the experiments of Dr. Robinovitch, in which rabbits were subjected to a current of low voltage, death taking place with a tension of fourteen volts. He says:

"It was found that consciousness was completely abolished when only about five volts were turned on, this current inducing a condition having every appearance of a deep sleep. About two and one-half times the voltage producing' electric sleep' was necessary to cause death. There was neither edema, blistering, nor burning of the parts to which the electrodes had been applied.

Pending the abolition of electrocution and of capital punishment in general, of which Dr. Robinovitch is a pronounced opponent, she urges that the process be made as humane as possible by the use of these electric currents of low voltage. By means of them suspension of consciousness is quickly and absolutely secured, and cardiac and respiratory paralysis is rendered certain; at the same time the horrible burning of the parts in contact with the electrodes is avoided. This last, of course, is a purely esthetic argument, but for the sake of the electrocutioner (it would be worth while abolishing this method of killing to get rid of such a word) and of the witnesses the process should be made as little brutalizing as possible. But perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the employment of a current of low voltage, assuming that there was no flaw in these experiments, and that the same certainty of results would obtain in the human body as in the rabbit, is that it surely kills, and the dreadful suspicion that possibly the physician is in the end the real executioner would then be stilled. Resuscitation was attempted in Dr. Robinovitch's experiments, and always failed when radial pulsations or heart-beats and muscular movements were not visible or perceptible-but not when these were present. In some of the cases of electrocution in New York there were chest movements and radial pulsations after from one to three contacts; and in one case there was a slight fluttering of the radial pulse even after the final contact was broken, tho the writer states that this rapidly ceased. So far as we know, no attempts at resuscitation were made in these cases, so the doubt remains whether life was really extinct.

"The present method of inflicting capital punishment in New