LETTERS AND ART.

decision should be rated as eccentric simply shows an eccentricity of the standards of those who thus rate it, and who show such a preposterous persistence in putting the cart before the horse." Mr. Richard Harding Davis, speaking to a World representative, said that people in America do not know how widely popular Gibson's drawings are. He said:

GIBSON'S DESERTION OF BLACK AND WHITE.

ΤΗ

HE announcement that Charles Dana Gibson, world-famous for his pen-and-ink drawings, in his thirty-ninth year and at the height of his success and reputation, has decided to forsake permanently his familiar medium, sacrificing thereby an income of $65,000 per year, has naturally been received with surprise by all but his intimate friends. Mr. Gibson takes this step, the press inform us, that he may have leisure to "study art" in Europe; and it is suggested that his ambition is to "find himself" as a painter.

CHARLES DANA GIBSON.

The chief living master of work with the pen's point, he has definitely renounced his accustomed medium, and states his intention to "study art" in Europe.

We are reminded of two cases akin, but not in any sense parallel, to Mr. Gibson's. A few years ago Macmonnies, his fame as a sculptor established, made an unexpected bid for laurels as a painter. But he entered the new field without relinquishing the old. And when Du Maurier, almost in his old age, turned to fiction and wrote the novel of the season," the book was illustrated by his own hand. But of Gibson's familiar pen-and-ink drawings, it appears, we are to have no more. Whatever the new medium through which we are to know him, on the old, we are assured, he has definitely turned his back. In conversation with a friend he spoke of his tenth annual book of drawings as "the last one he would ever publish." While his decision has aroused some enthusiasm as a proof that an artist is not necessarily enslaved by great financial success, there sounds also a note of regret over his departure from a field which he has made peculiarly his own. painter, it is pointed out, his work must remain inaccessible to many of his admirers. The New York World regards his action as a biting comment upon the supremacy of mercantile standards in modern life. "In his most malicious humor," the paper remarks, "he never drew a cartoon that touched more surely on the ruling fashion of the day-money folly." And the New York Times comments:

As a

'That wonder should be expressed at the fact that a man gives up a certainty of $65,000 a year in order to do something which he likes better than to do the work by which he gains that income is a depressing proof of the hold which the mercantile standard' has taken on the popular mind. Why should a man desire money? Obviously in order to be secure, in order to be independent, in order to be free to do what he likes.

"Mr. Gibson has simply made the decision of a sensible man bent upon getting the best and utmost out of his life. That his

"Editors send me all over the world. I find wherever I go Dana's pictures.

In the Lane & Crawford department-store windows, in Yokohama, I found his books used to fill double-window displays. "I know several people who were presented to the Emperor of Germany, who asked him, while discussing art topics, who was his favorite in American art work. He went into a long encomium on Dana Gibson, and said he loved to look at his Bachelor Supper' picture. The King and Queen of England, when they were the Prince and Princess of Wales, purchased his pictures in the Strand. I have seen them decorating the palm-leaf shacks in Central America. In Durban, South Africa, I have seen them stuck on the walls of houses."

He added:

"As far as financial success goes, Dana can very well afford to knock off, work altogether. No black-and-white artist has had the monetary success he has had, and unlike most artists he has had a sane business head.

"

'While he was illustrating the troubles of young men and women in love he was buying real estate in New York out of the proceeds of these love-trouble pictures."

According to Mr. Robert W. Chambers, who publishes in Collier's Weekly a word of farewell to Gibson, the artist has been working for twenty years to get in the position in which he finds himself today. He is described as having burned his bridges behind him, and as setting out for Europe "with his school-books under his arm," promising himself a year in Spain, a year in France, and a year in Italy, in order "to let every influence play upon him." This, we are told, because he realizes that he has reached his limit in black and white. Says Mr. Chambers, by way of estimate:

'First of all, and always and last, in the work of Dana Gibson, is one aware of the splendid vigor of a wholesome and cleanminded man. Lacking that inherent decency, no man can hold a nation as he holds it; lacking that, the dazzling technical qualities of his work were vain as the flicker of northern lights. That he has evolved types of loveliness and beauty, making women and children what they sometimes are and what they were meant to be, is important; that he has created man as he sometimes is and was always meant to be; that his humor is the truest humor, his wit crystalline, his pathos true pathos, his observation faultless, his satire generous-all this is important. It is of every importance, too, that he is technically capable; but it is of the greatest importance that he who wields these powers is a clean, high-minded gentleman.

From "Life." Copyright 1886 by Life Publishing Co.
GIBSON'S FIRST PUBLISHED DRAWING.

the Leloirs, Roybet, that never-to-be-forgotten master Alphonse de Neuville; then from the men of one idea—a brilliant one, but only one-he may have learned at least enough to generously appreciate the one idea and avoid it-men like Willette, Louis Le Grand, Steinlen, Bac, Myrbach, Rossi―men like Phil May, like Sambourne, like Raven Hill; men like Schlittgen.

"I do not know what he has been taught by our own men who work with the point, as the majority of our own men now living have been inspired by him.

"He could not have had a purer inspiration than the rare penwork of Robert Blum, of Abbey at his best; he, better than I, knows what he may owe to them-perhaps to Reinhart, too, and to the brilliant Wenzell.

No one now living, says Mr. Chambers, can compare with Gibson as a worker with the pen's point. We read further:

"He appears to be utterly unconscious of his medium, oblivious to tool and surface and area. There seems, to the fascinated layman, to be no question of composition where composition is so fundamental, so faultless as to be unintrusive. There is the result, telling on one page its complete story of gentle satire, of folly, of pathos, all vitally a-quiver with human interest.

"It is not versatility in the cheap sense that permits Dana Gibson to take his place with Hogarth and infinitely overshadow him; to pick up the torch dropped by Du Maurier and carry it far, far forward; to idly play with the enchanted pen laid down by Leloir, Marold, and Blum, and watch it obey like a live thing, advancing the messages they were carrying when the last call interrupted. . Pleasure he invariably gives in whatever gay or somber sermon he etches for us; and draining the cup he offers, no man, no woman, no child, has ever shrunk from bitter dregs—no man, no woman, no child, has ever been the worse for taking what he has offered. I do not even mean in its worst and subtlest sense; I mean that no intellect has been dulled, no intelligence stultified, no lowgrade mind permitted the complacent inertia which, for example, is the sordid consequence of the colored supplement,' which every week drags lower the intellects of the great unwashed.

THE

SPIRITUAL SIDE OF SWINBURNE'S GENIUS. HE popular impression of Mr. Swinburne is certainly not that of an essentially spiritual poet. Yet two writers have recently emphasized the spiritual side of his genius-the side which, according to one of these critics, "is at once the most characteristic and the least clearly understood." The same writer, Mr. George Barlow, goes on to say that he looks upon Mr. Swinburne as one of the world's very great spiritual poets," and that he regards him as being, like Victor Hugo, in exceptional nearness to the divine element in the universe, the element that makes for love, pity, purity, in fact, for holiness." Mr. Barlow admits, and regrets, that two or three of the early poems "tend to spoil the splendid spiritual harmony of the wonderful imaginative structure which Mr. Swinburne's genius has built up." Mr. William Morton Payne, associate editor of The Dial (Chicago), supplies the introduction to a new volume of "Selected Poems" by Swinburne, a volume which may be safely regarded as virginibus puerisque, the early poems of the type regretted by Mr. Barlow having been excluded. The affluence of Swinburne's melody, asserts Mr. Payne, has tended to obscure to the view of superficial readers his quality of "ethical fervor." Of the "Songs before Sunrise" this critic

...

says: It may be doubted if within the limits of any other single volume of English poetry there may be found, in such spontaneity of flow and amplitude of stream, such expression of the most exalted ethical idealism." Again, he speaks of Swinburne as one who arouses "the deepest of our religious emotions." The essential attitudes of the Christian temper, Mr. Payne continues, receive Swinburne's fullest sympathy, "save only the meek and lowly atti tude, upon which he pours out the vials of his scorn." The 'proud exaltation of the full-statured soul," we are told, "is the key to Swinburne's ethics, through its close relation to his conception of duty and his strenuous demand for complete sacrifice of self, for utter and absolute devotion to the cause of man's bodily and spiritual freedom." Of "The Pilgrims" and "Super Flumina Babylonis" Mr. Payne writes: "There is no finer ethical message in all English poetry than breathes through the lines of these two lofty poems." We read further:

"No poet has expressed more impressively than he the contrast between the vexed insignificance of man and the calm sublimity of nature. But no poet has more proudly matched the human spirit against all the material immensities which it contemplates, and so confidently asserted its inherent dignity and indefectible strength. Not, like Byron, seeking in nature an anodyne for grief, nor, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, disheartened by the deeds of men, turning to her for renewal of the spirit and strengthening of the faith, we find Swinburne drawing from her from the first the elements of primal strength, and glorying in her power and beauty..

"Swinburne's attitude toward the fundamental notions of religious belief has been variously described as that of paganism, pantheism, and pananthropism. It is a pagan attitude only in so far as he has given us a vivid setting forth of the contrast between classical and Christian ideals. In the Hymn to Proserpine' and 'The Last Oracle,' still more in the two Greek tragedies, he has presented the pagan point of view with so marvelous a degree of insight and penetrative sympathy that some of his readers have taken for a confession of faith what is no more than a study in dramatic effect. A real confession of faith, no doubt, is embodied in Hertha' and the Hymn of Man,' and those who wish to call this faith pantheistic or pananthropomorphic are welcome to the terms. They have lost whatever terrors they once had for timid minds, and now move in the best theological society. Whatever we may call it, Swinburne's religion is that of one who resolutely rejects all dogmas and historical creeds, and with equal earnestness clings to the divine idea that underlies the creeds and bestows upon them their vitality. He draws the same sharp contrast that is drawn by Shelley and Hugo between the eternal spirit of Christianity and its historical accretions."

"That this grotesque notion should still prevail is a direct consequence of the unfortunate manner of his introduction to the general public. It is based upon a few pieces only, full of the recklessness of exuberant youth. . . . And so to many people the poet of Thalassius' and the Songs before Sunrise' still stands for morbid sensualism; the poet who almost more than any of his fellow singers exalts spirit above sense and transports his readers into an atmosphere almost too rarefied for ordinary mortals to breathe.' To quote again from Mr. Barlow, who writes in The Contemporary Review:

"

Always in Mr. Swinburne's greater work we find the dominating conviction that sense and spirit are not separate, are, in fact, inseparable, and that, in the highest love, it is the actual imminent soul which speaks and makes itself felt through the infinitely delicate and subtle physical fabric of passion. . . Victor Hugo and Mr. Swinburne are both, primarily, spiritual poets, poets of exalted spiritual passion. Mr. Swinburne has a form-sense, an apprehension of the glory of physical beauty, which was to some extent wanting in Hugo-we find it, of course, in Gautier and other poets of more definitely artistic natures—but, none the less, it is as a poet of spiritual passion that he stands forth unique and supreme among English poets.

"In drawing special attention to 'Songs before Sunrise' and

THE DRAMATIC SEASON IN FRANCE.

Mhich has just opened in Paris.

ANY new plays are announced for the theatrical season

which has just opened in Paris. All the prominent and popular playwrights are to have new works presented, and the preliminary gossip indicates that the tendency-play and the problemplay, somewhat in eclipse last year, will once more claim attention. Of the three or four novelties already produced, but one is something more than a picture of French manners, with illicit love, intrigue, disappointment in marriage, and so on, as the leading themes. "Vers l'Amour" ("Toward Love"), a drama produced at the Antoine Theater, is credited with merits of construction and style and character-portrayal, but its subject is neither original nor attractive from any non-French point of view. The interesting and "serious" play alluded to is regarded as a tendency play, such tendency being féministe and antimasculine. The object of the drama, apparently, is to portray man as vain, selfish, jealous of his privileged position in society, and indisposed to accord to woman equality of rights and of status.

is due to a woman, who has no business to write at all, in his opinion. He is inconsiderate, irritable, even brutal, and the iife of this poor wife is more miserable than before.

After a final scene of extreme cruelty and brutality on Maxime's part, he leaves his home and wife, and betakes himself to Russia, with all the savings accumulated by Eva, in the company of another woman.

The critic of Le Figaro, while severely arraigning the play as full of prejudice and the determination to point a preconceived féministe moral, admits that an interesting and fruitful psychological theme underlies it. One might study," he says, "with more impartiality, candor, and humanity, the sentiments of this man, this husband, who finds himself divided between gratitude to his

atist, Maxime. Maxime is a rake, while Eva, the wife, is all devotion and sincerity. She has great literary talent, but does not even suspect it, any more than the dissolute husband does.

His vices and excesses finally produce mental disorder, and he has to be confined in a private asylum. But he has made all sorts of contracts with magazine editors, theatrical managers, and publishers, being a prolific and popular author, and has received considerable money in advance. To announce his insanity, which is not hopeless, is to ruin him for life, to bankrupt him materially and morally. What is to be done? How is his reputation to be saved and scandal avoided?

Eva, the obscure and modest wife, in the sudden emergency, discovers her literary skill and hits upon a plan of salvation. She informs the friends and associates of Maxime that he is not well enough to see anybody, tho able to do his work quietly. Then she undertakes to finish the plays, books, and articles he has contracted to supply. She succeeds remarkably well; she does even better work than her husband was capable of, and the public is satisfied and pleased. Maxime's reputation rises; there is more demand for his writings than ever.

Meantime he is cured of his mental disorder and returns home to find his position improved in every way. Is he grateful to his faithful and brilliant wife? Does he learn to appreciate and cherish her? Not at all. He is jealous of his wife's achievements; he resents her having used his name; he is chagrined, humiliated at the thought that his prestige, as well as his material well-being,

wife and the loss of dignity and selfesteem he feels in realizing that he is inferior to her and no longer the grand head of the establishment." As it is, he concludes, the play is of no psychological value, since it makes the man a blackguard and a low, contemptible egotist, and what does the conduct of such a man prove?-Translations made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

EXPRESSION OF THE "RACE-MIND" IN LITERATURE.

A

FORMULA advanced by Mr. Brunetière, the distinguished French critic, assumes the existence of a European literature. By this he means not a combined group of national literatures, but a single literature common to European civilization, to which common literature the various national literatures, in their periods of culmination, contribute. A still more comprehensive literary formula, along similar lines, is advanced by George Edward Woodberry, formerly professor of comparative literature in Columbia University, in his recent volume, "The Torch." In this book he elaborates the idea "that mankind in the process of civilization stores up race-power, in one or another form, so that it is a continually growing fund; and that literature, preeminently, is such a store of spiritual race-power, derived originally from the historical life or from the general experience of men, and transformed by imagination so that all which is not necessary falls away from it, and what is left is truth in its simplest, most vivid, and vital form." The race-mind, according to Professor Woodberry's conception, is the epitome of the past, containing all of human energy, knowledge, experience, that survives. The growth of the race-mind, he argues, makes for the fusion of the nations, the substitution of the thought-tie for the blood-tie." But literature is "the organ of the race-mind," the most universal and comprehensive form" in which it finds expression. Hence " a nation's poets are its true owners, and by the stroke of a pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens." Along this line of thought he continues:

"I conceive of history as a single process in which, through century after century, in race after race, the soul of man proceeds in a progressive comprehension of the universe and evolution of its own humanity, and passes on to each new generation its accumulated knowledge and developed energies, in their totality and without loss, at the acme of achievement. I conceive of this inheriting

and bequeathing power as having its life and action in the racemind. I conceive of literature as an organ of the race-mind, and of education as the process by which the individual enters into the race-mind, becomes more and more man, and [becomes so] in the spiritual life, mainly, by means of literature. I conceive of the body of men who thus live and work in the soul as constituting the intellectual state, that republic of letters, in which the race-mind reaches, from age to age, its maximum of knowledge and power, in men of genius and those whose lives they illumine, move, and direct; the unity of mankind is the ideal end of this state, and the freeing of the soul which takes place in it is its means."

The race-mind, says the writer, in building itself from immemorial time,

"takes.unerringly the best that anywhere comes to be in the world, holds to it with the cling of fate, and lets all else fall into oblivion; out of this best it has made, and still fashions, that enduring world of idea and emotion into which we are born as truly as into the natural world. . . . The race-mind unifies the race which it preserves; that is its irresistible line of advance. It wipes out the barriers of time, language, and country. It undoes the mischief of Babel, and restores to mankind one tongue in which all things can be understood by all men. It fuses the bibles of all nations in one wisdom and one practise. It knocks off the tribal fetters of caste and creed; and, substituting thought for blood as the bond of the world, it slowly liberates that free soul, which is one in all men and common to all mankind. To free the soul in the individual life, and to accomplish the unity of mankind-that is its work."

To share in this work, he continues, is the peculiar and characteristic office of literature. Again:

་་

Whatever forms the race-mind may mold itself into, literature is its most universal and comprehensive form. That is why literature is the great conservator of society. It shares in the life of the race-mind, partakes of its nature, as language does of thought, corresponds to it accurately, duplicates it, is its other self. It is through literature mainly that we know the race-mind, and come to possess it; for tho the term may seem abstract, the thing is real. Men of genius are great in proportion as they share in it, and national literatures are great in proportion as they embody and express it.

"The life of the spirit in mankind is one and universal, burns with the same fires, moves to the same issues, joins in a single history; it is the race-mind realizing itself cumulatively in time, and mainly through the inheriting power of literature."

"TH

THE RUSSIAN OFFICER IN RUSSIAN
LITERATURE.

HERE is not depicted in Russian literature a single type of officer which inspires sympathy or commands respect," says. Mr. G. Savitch, the Russian critic, in La Revue (Paris). He outlines the military characters in certain Russian plays and stories, such as Colonel Skalazoub in Griboiédov's comedy, “Trop d'Esprit Nuit." Skalazoub is not only absolutely stupid, but a rogue, an egotist, and an imbecile. When asked if he knew a certain lady he answered, "I don't recollect that she was ever in my regiment." In Lermontov's “Le Héros de Nos Temps" the most intelligent officer in the regiment, Petchorine, is provoked to a duel; and his comrades, with whom he is unpopular, simply plot his assassination by managing that his pistol has no bullet in it, while that of his adversary is properly loaded. The officers of Lermontov are blackguards in their conduct toward women, drunkards and gamblers who sometimes stake their wives.

The greatest of novels as a revelation of Russian military life is "The Duel" of Kouprine, of which the critic says:

"The great merit of Kouprine's work is that it exhibits to us in a fresh and masterly manner the daily life of the Russian officer as he is surrounded by his comrades. Mr. Kouprine knows this life thoroughly, and in its minutest details, because he experienced it for a long time. Having recovered his liberty, however, he suc ceeded in conquering the hatred which he felt for his former military surroundings, and his book is neither a satire nor a pamphlet, but an impartial and perfectly calm picture of manners. Its value,

therefore, is not to be overestimated. It can create no scandal, for there is no recognizable personality in it, nor is it the production of a doctrinaire or a politician. It will doubtless serve, however, to heal and purify the Russian army, which has long stood in need of some such lesson."

Mr. Savitch here introduces us to the acts and conversations of the officers depicted by Kouprine, the principal subject of talk being unprovoked assaults on civilians, or assassinations of innkeepers and others by young officers. Thus:

'Each of these young fellows knows a string of such anecdotes, all relating to the same topic. Here we have a tipsy cornet who rushes among a crowd of Jews and scatters them with drawn saber. A sublieutenant sabers a student who had inadvertently jogged his elbow. An officer shoots dead a civilian who had ventured the remark that a gentleman never addressed ladies to whom he had not been introduced."

These young officers of the Russian novelist exhibit “a mentality only found in criminals or degenerates." Added to this they are poor and "sometimes keep back for months, even for years, the money sent to the soldiers by friends. This money they gain possession of on opening the letters, as the service ordains, which come to the privates of the regiment." They are, moreover, hideously cruel to their subordinates. This, says Mr. Savitch, results from the German influences which for a century have prevailed in the Russian army. To quote from "The Duel" of Mr. Kouprine a passage describing the preparations for a review:

"The soldiers are literally worn out by being kept on the paradeground two or three hours longer than usual, and on every side is heard the incessant sound of blows, in all companies, in all ranks. An officer is often seen striking in a towering rage, one after another, every man in his company. The non-commissioned officers beat the men cruelly for the least fault, knock them down with a blow of the fist; the faces of their victims stream with blood; their teeth are knocked out or their ear-drums burst."

Suicide is described as frequent in the Russian army. Some of the scenes portrayed by Kouprine, says his critic, are too frightful to repeat. An exception to the cruel, drunken, rascally Russian officers is portrayed as follows by our novelist :

"Captain Stelkovsky was an odd man. He was unmarried and of abundant means for his regimental needs. Each month he received from an unknown source, in addition to his pay, 200 roubles. Independent in character, he scarcely associated with his comrades, and was by temperament a thorough going debauchee. He had a series of mistresses whom he engaged as servants for a month and then discharged them with a gift of money. This went on month by month, year in, year out. He never beat his soldiers or abused them with bad language. Stelkovsky spoke little, and rarely raised his voice. When he did speak the soldiers were petrified by his words. His comrades were not well disposed toward him, but his men loved him-perhaps the only officer in the Russian army who was so regarded by rank and file."

Mr. Savitch concludes as follows:

Books like The Duel' do not afford much material for pure literary criticism. Whether they be artistic or not, and the work of Mr. Kouprine is certainly that of an artist, their interest does not lie in this. They are valuable for their scrupulous, precise, and sincere documentation, thanks to which a complete phase of Russian social life hitherto ignored or concealed behind a thick fog of misrepresentations or falsehoods is suddenly unveiled and appears under the implacable light of truth."-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

FOLLOWING the example of their earliest teachers in civilization, states a writer in the London Athenæum, the Japanese have always been great dictionary-makers, encyclopedists, literary collectors, and bibliographers. Among the facts he cites in support of this statement are the following: "As early as the ninth century Shigeno no Sadanushi compiled a classified list of books, which must have been mainly Chinese, in a thousand (thin) volumes. This work appears to have been lost. Sadanushi was followed by Fujihara no Atsumoto, who, in the eleventh century, produced a catalogue in 360 volumes. Much later Hanawa Hoki Ichi, a wagakusha (Japanese scholar) of the end of the Bakufu period, who died in 1822, published an authoritative list called the Gunsho Ruijiu' ('Classified Collection of the Host of Books'), which ran to 530 volumes, the contents of which were arranged under 1,273 subdivisions."

E

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

POWER FROM THUNDER-CLOUDS VER since men knew these two things-that the energy displayed in a thunder-storm is electric, and that electricity may be utilized-they have been regretting that so much power is allowed to go to waste; and occasionally a bold inventor tries to harness the storm as we have already harnessed the cataract. The trouble about doing this is something like that which would confront a man who should desire to utilize the energy of the gunpowder exploded in a battle: the energy is all there; the problem is to get it into controllable shape. We need a motor that will run with a current of high intensity and small volume. Such a motor has been devised by a Russian, Mr. N. P. Michkine, who thinks he has taken a preliminary step toward solving the problem. He describes his plan in Electritchestvo, from which journal Mr. C. Domar gives us the following information in Cosmos (Paris):

"The quantity of electricity stored in the atmosphere may be estimated by the effects sometimes produced by lightning. But clouds that carry electric charges are only, so to speak, greater centers of accumulation for the electricity which in ordinary weather is spread throughout the atmosphere.

"We know that electric discharges also manifest themselves by heat effects. When a battery of condensers is discharged through a wire of proper size, we may not only heat the wire to redness, but even volatilize it. Thus there are numerous cases of the volatilization of telegraph wires by lightning. . . . On April 19, 1902, at the meteorological observatory of Pavlovsk, Russia, when a balloon was about to be released, an electric discharge, passing from a cloud to the earth, completely volatilized a steel wire 0.8 millimeter [inch] in diameter, that held it. The remarkable thing

An essential feature of the motor is that it can not be run with an alternating current; but if the alternating current is transformed in any convenient way-by a Roentgen tube, for instance--the motor may be run by an induction coil.

Mr. Michkine believes that the first part of the problem may be regarded as solved. The inventor began his experiments in 1902, at the Agronomic Institute of Novo-Alexandria, where he used captive balloons to raise point-collectors into the air. These were connected to one of the combs of the motor by an insulated conductor. The collectors were composed either of thin circular plates with numerous steel points, or of cylinders to the sides of which were soldered a number of palettes, each bearing 15 points. The collectors with disks, generally very light, were set up on kites of the Rotch system, held by insulated copper wire 5 millimeters [ inch] in diameter.

"The maximum height reached by the kites was only 120 meters [394 feet]. The author believes that if, at the moment of the experiment, it had been possible to send them higher, a motor designed for a higher tension would have furnished a more considerable quantity of work.

“A paper on the subject of atmospheric electricity was presented by Roma to the Paris Academy of Sciences about 50 years ago. Imagine,' says Roma in his memoir,' sheaves of flame 9 to 10 feet long and an inch thick, whose appearance was accompanied by a noise like a pistol shot. In less than one hour I succeeded in obtaining thirty such sheaves, without counting other smaller discharges.””—Translations made for THE LITERARy Di

GEST.

SOME PERILS OF INDOOR LIFE.

toward the production of a thunder-storm.

Experiments in similar conditions, made by Kohlrausch, show that at the moment of a lightning discharge a copper conductor 5 millimeters inch] in diameter may be melted. He has calculated that to melt such a conductor requires a current of at least 52,000 amperes for a thousandth of a second. . . These results have been confirmed by the experiments of Pokkels. A rod of basalt placed in the neighborhood of an electric circuit enables us to judge of the intensity of the current by a peculiar magnetic state that it acquires. By examination of the fragments of a basaltic rock struck by lightning, Pokkels found that in one case the intensity of the current could not have been below 6,450 amperes; in another case it was 10,800 amperes."

Michkine uses these data to calculate the quantity of energy contained in a cloud, and concludes that it amounts to at least enough to run an 8 horse-power motor for one hour. Thus, if we could utilize the energy wasted in a thunder-storm-energy that probably exists in the atmosphere at other times also-we should have a most valuable source of power. The electricity in a cloud, however, tho its energy is great, possesses this energy largely by virtue of its high tension, the actual volume of current in a discharge being small, somewhat as the energy of a rifle bullet is due chiefly to its velocity, not to the small mass of lead composing it. If we are to utilize the energy of atmospheric electricity, therefore, we must have a motor that will work with a small volume of current. This motor Michkine believes that he has found. Says Mr. Domar:

"His motor is made on the principle of electrified points. The first models are of very simple construction; a metallic axis carries a series of ebonite disks; a pair of metallic combs is so placed that the teeth are perpendicular to the diameter of the disk. One comb being charged positively or negatively, the other is connected with the earth; the disks then at once begin to rotate rapidly. The maximum speed is attained when the two combs are charged with opposite electricities, and it may then easily reach several thousand turns a minute. If only one comb is charged, the speed is less. An easy calculation shows that to work this motor an insignificant current is sufficient.

"The industrial effectiveness of the point-motor is very high.

gerous, in a recent issue of The Clinique (Chicago), by Dr. Clifford Mitchell. First of all he asserts that the character of life in America has changed and is still changing, not only from the outdoor life of pioneering and settlement to the indoor life of commerce and manufactures, but also from the rough life of manual agriculture to the less laborious methods of modern farming. This change in the mode of life of the people has been followed, he believes, by a corresponding change in the diseases to which they are subject. He says:

The change in physical conditions resulting from the indoor life is of the utmost importance from the standpoint of national welfare. . . . Inasmuch as a nation's existence may depend any time upon the physical and moral strength of the man behind the gun,' it behooves us to make every effort to prevent the deterioration which inevitably follows congestion and overcrowding. In my opinion the problem is more sociological than medical, and there are many thinkers working on it in all countries.

The establishment of parks and playgrounds and the extension of trolley lines into the country are doing considerable good in the way of giving the people access to places where there is fresher air, but in addition I hold that near every large inland city there should be a national park of larger size reserved forever for the use of the people and containing attractions sufficient to draw the crowds away from the cities on Sundays and on holidays.

"The tendency of the people to live in the suburbs is to be commended, especially in families where there are young children; but as yet the number of suburban towns suitable for the immense population of laboring people is relatively small, and the problem of building up such suburbs for such a class is one of the most important which we have. It is probably, however, not too late in this country to take these things in time before the general physical condition of our large city populations is hopelessly deteriorated. It is imperative that those who work in factories and in offices should have a greater annual supply of fresh air than they now possess. Labor-unions should by combined effort establish colonies of workers in the various near-by suburbs before the factories and railroad yards have entirely taken possession of them.

“The problem of supplying fresh air to those who are even too poor to take a trolley ride is indeed a serious one. It is said that there are people in the Chicago Ghetto district who have never