to drink and to smoke what he wanted, and to make no apologies to any one." As early as 1869, at the age of 27, he wrote a book called "Tobacco and Alcohol," in which he argued that "the coming man would drink, and would use tobacco." Along with these various accomplishments, Mr. Fiske was an excellent singer and violinist.

The Independent (July 11) thus speaks of him:

"It is this astonishing breadth of reading and grasp of memory combined with philosophic reflection that give a unique character to Mr. Fiske's historical works. At first indeed his writing was of a technically philosophic nature, and his early books give us what is probably the most lucid and agreeable exposition of evolution yet written. He was an avowed disciple and interpreter of Herbert Spencer, but brought to the task of interpretation the qualities of imagination and grace so conspicuously absent in the master. Later he became interested in American history, and formed the plan of writing the annals of the country from the discoveries of Columbus down to the present day. In discharging this task he did not work out the scheme chronologically, but took up whatever period attracted his attention at the time. Fortunately his work is complete from the discovery to the adoption of the Constitution, with the single exception of the period of the French and Indian wars, which has been treated by Parkman with even greater brilliance and learning than Mr. Fiske could have brought to its exposition.

"Apart from ease of style and skill in narration, the chief characteristic of this series of studies is the frank and unreserved adoption of evolution as the key to open the meaning of the mysteries of historic succession. In this way a certain consistence and simplicity are given by the historian to the most bewildering complication of facts, and the mind is carried easily from event to event and from age to age. There is undoubtedly danger in such a system; when the theory of evolution has become antiquated, as all human theories must, the historian's philosophy may seem no longer to illuminate, but rather to obscure his narration. Yet it must be admitted, on the other hand, that the great histories, whether of antiquity or of modern times, which are memorable in literature, have commonly held their place more by reason of some such peculiar philosophy of life than on account of mere skill in assembling details of fact."

The New York Evening Post (July 5), under the caption "John Fiske, Popularizer," gives the following judgment of him: "The work of the brilliant man whose life was cut short by the blind fury [the heat] yesterday is doubtless best described as that of a purveyor of knowledge to the commonalty. John Fiske's mind was powerful, but not originating. He knew what true learning was, and where it was; and it was his delight and highest function to go into the workshops of the great laborers in philosophy and in history, and come out to tell the world what they were doing. He was essentially a lecturer.

Child of an age that lectures, not creates,

said Lowell of himself, ruefully. But lecturing may be made so much of a fine art that it may almost be said to be itself creative. It was so in Fiske's hands. For mastery of his subject without dulness, for lucidity and charm and fresh enthusiasm, we prob. ably have never had his like-at least, in the abstruser philosophical and historical subjects which it was his joy to expound and illuminate. His chosen and successful rôle was thus that of a popularizer of useful knowledge. His early writings in elucidation of Herbert Spencer, for example, probably had ten readers in this country where the original works of the evolutionary philosopher had one. The reason was that Fiske had the gift of exposition, and was able, by his style, as no man ever accused Spencer of being, to make philosophy as musical as is Apollo's lute. If Huxley was, as he boasted, the 'bulldog' of Darwin, Fiske was the mocking-bird of Spencer. And to him, above all lecturers and interpreters, may rightly be applied Coleridge's famous distinction between 'popularize' and 'plebificate.' John Fiske was no smatterer. If it is true that other men labored and he entered into their labors, it was by no royal road. He went to the sources as well as they; he was able to check off their work, and so to escape the danger of their leading him around by the nose. His own industry was enormous, his reading of a tremendous sweep, his passion for investigation like a living foun

tain within him, and his curiosity ever unsated. So it was the real thing he gave out to the public-genuine scholarship, firsthand information, and not the mere echo of his authorities."

IN

TCHAIKOWSKY'S MUSIC AND TOLSTOY.

N view of the highly original and unconventional views on art generally, and music in particular, held by Count Tolstoy, his appreciation of Tchaikowsky's compositions is a matter of peculiar interest. In a biography of the great Russian musician just published at St. Petersburg by his brother, the first meeting between Tchaikowsky and Count Tolstoy is described, as well as a singular concert arranged by Rubinstein at the Conservatory, over which he presided for the count's exclusive and special benefit. That is, Tolstoy was the only auditor present, while Tchaikowsky conducted, playing among other things some selections from his own works. With regard to the first meeting, the biographer writes:

"From the first appearance of Tolstoy's works in print, Tchaikowsky, then a young student of jurisprudence, passionately loved and almost adored the great novelist. He regarded him as a magician, demigod, possessor of all the secrets of the human soul. And yet this magician descended from his pinnacle and first stretched out his hand to his youthful disciple. This happened in 1876. Ten years later, when Tchaikowsky's enthusiasm for Tolstoy had cooled somewhat, the composer made the following entry in his diary regarding that memorable meeting: 'When I was introduced to Tolstoy, I was seized with a fear and a feeling of extreme diffidence. It seemed to me that this greatest searcher of hearts would, with one glance, penetrate the inmost recesses of my soul. Before such a seer and psychologist, I felt that it was idle to attempt concealment of the rubbish at the bottom of one's moral being and to present only the deceitful surface. If he is kind, I thought, he will, like a physician studying a wound, delicately and tenderly avoid irritating the painful parts; but his very care will show that nothing has eluded him. If, on the other hand, he is not merciful, he will stick his finger right into the center of the wound. I dreaded both possibilities. But neither came to pass. The greatest master of the human heart on paper proved himself in actual contact with men a simple, sincere nature, revealing nothing of the penetration I had feared.'"

Not long after this meeting Rubinstein arranged the concert above mentioned by way of showing his and Tchaikowsky's keen admiration for Tolstoy's art and mission. The biographer describes this occasion and subsequent discussions of it thus:

"The orchestra performed, among other pieces, the andante from Tchaikowsky's quartette in D major. Tolstoy sat beside the composer, and this number affected him so deeply that he burst into tears and wept for a considerable space of time. 'Never in my life,' says the composer in his diary,' have I been so touched and flattered as by this spontaneous tribute to my art. Later he wrote to Tolstoy: 'The two ears of so great an artist as you are capable of yielding more inspiration than tens of thousands of ordinary ears.' To this' Tolstoy wrote in answer: 'My pleasure was keen. This visit to Moscow will remain one of my best memories. I have never received a more grateful reward for my literary labors than this rare musical evening was to me.'

"With this letter Tolstoy sent Tchaikowsky some musical material, consisting of snatches of national melodies and peasant songs. Referring to these, he wrote: 'I hope you will develop these themes in the Mozart-Haydn style and not after the Beethoven-Berlioz manner, which is artificial and strains after unexpected effects.' Subsequently, Tchaikowsky records in his diary, Tolstoy very sharply criticized Beethoven in conversation and questioned his genius.

"This attitude toward Beethoven was the first germ of distrust and dissatisfaction sown by Tolstoy himself in the mind of his ardent admirer. Tchaikowsky made the following sorrowful entry in his diary in regard to Tolstoy's depreciation of Beethoven: This is a trait which is not at all distinctive of great men. To lower to one's own plane of inability, to depreciate the ge

The

The drama is divided into two distinct parts, each part consisting of several acts, and having a complete plot of its own. first part was published some years ago, but until recently the play in its entirety had not been produced outside of Norway, and in Germany it had been prohibited. The production at the Berlin Theater was an extraordinary success, in spite of a rather inadequate interpretation. In Paris, on the other hand, where Bjoernson also supervised its presentation, only the "intellectuals" received it with enthusiasm, the public remaining rather cold and somewhat puzzled. But in the journals and magazines a lively controversy has been carried on between the playwright and his admirers on the one hand, and certain dramatic critics, including Jules Lemaitre and Larroumet, over French treatment of foreign art and letters, and especially of the Northern drama. The first part of the play deals with religious mysticism and the salvation of society through Christian love and self-sacrifice. In brief, the story is as follows:

Pastor Sang, the hero, is an ardent follower of Christ. He has disposed of all his worldly goods and literally obeyed the Gospel in regard to taking no thought about to-morrow. His love of his fellows is intense, and the whole community is under his spell' and influence. He effects marvelous cures by faith and prayer, and the whole meaning of life to him is summed up in the practise of the golden rule.

But his own wife is sick unto death, and he can not restore her health. He has called his two children home from distant parts to pray and work for the recovery of their mother. He is shocked to find that they have lost something of their absolute faith in him and his religion, and the wife, too, doubts. To her lack of faith he attributes the failure of his efforts, but he does not despair. On the contrary, he feels a fresh access of strength, hope, and confidence, and one day, while he is in the little church near his house, a "miracle" occurs. During a terrible storm the church and the pastor's home threaten to be crushed by the subsidence and fall of a huge rock, but about half-way in its descent the enormous mass is suddenly arrested and turned in a different direction. The pastor's triumph is complete; but at this very moment his sick wife, feeling herself stronger, rises from her bed and goes to meet him at the door of his study, and while he offers up thanks for the fulfilment of his prayer, she falls dead in his arms. He is terribly shaken. He murmurs, "This is not what I have prayed for-or?" and after uttering the last word, implying doubt in Providence, he, too, falls dead. The word "or" has killed him, for he could not survive an involuntary negation of a life of self-renunciation, faith, and trust.

In the second part of the drama we find as the chief characters Sang's two children, Rachel and Elias. The action takes place in a factory town, in the midst of a general strike. The employers have mercilessly oppressed and exploited the workmen; the latter have revolted, and the contest has assumed a fierce and tragic form. The men are without fuel, bread, or light, and their suffering is extreme. In the first act three coffins are car

ried out from one hut-a poor, starving woman has killed herself and her two small children in despair, and in order to arouse the conscience of the remorseless rich, Elias, Sang's son, has given everything he possessed to the strikers, and his sister has opened a hospital for the sick among them. Both are enthusiasts in the cause of labor, and as devoted to humanity as was their father, tho they manifest it in a social-economic, not in a religious, way. The strike fails utterly, owing chiefly to the aggressive leadership of a practical Nietzscheite, one of the manufacturers named Kholger. Then young Sang falls into despair. He has not improved the condition of the laborers, tho he has sacrificed all. He determines to make a final and supreme sacrifice. He becomes a martyr and an avenger. He explodes dynamite in a building holding an assembly of the manufacturers, and nearly all are killed, himself included. Kholger, however, is only wounded, and he is taken to the hospital of Rachel Sang, who, in turn, is weary of life and ready to declare it aimless, purposeless, empty, and devoid of meaning.

However, this mood passes away. Into her charge are given two nephews of the crippled Kholger, named respectively Spera and Credo, and she concludes that, after all, the meaning of life is in kindness to one's fellows, in love and mercy and forgive. ness. The drama closes with a visit by Rachel and the two children to Kholger to plead with him, in the name of conscience and generosity, for better treatment of the workmen. The kingdom of God, she is convinced, is on earth, and regeneration depends on good-will and intelligence.

The critics interpret this drama to summarize the development of the ethical ideal. Neither in mystical religion nor in social and institutional reform are we to seek the solution of life's problem. That problem is beyond human faculties and powers. We can only be kind, mutually helpful, and compassionate-the rest is a mystery. Clemenceau, in Le Bloc, draws this moral from the play: "The father died because he did not comprehend that the true miracle is the reasoning man, the unchanging order of nature; and the son, who sought a magical improvement through an act of violence and revolution, found expiation in death and changed nothing at all. Our emancipation must come through goodness guided by science."

The drama is to be produced in London, in an English adaptation by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the creator of several modern parts.-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

AN ARRAIGNMENT OF LITERARY MEN.

THE

HE science of comparative literature is of recent origin. According to Prof. H. Macaulay Possnett, the first formal work on the subject was his own published in 1886 with the title "Comparative Literature." But there are now to be found in universities of France, America, and other countries chairs founded for the study of this subject, and it is receiving increasing attention from the scholars of all countries.

In an article in The Contemporary Review (June), marked by an extraordinary degree of egotism, Professor Possnett writes of the principles and methods of the science, referring at every point to what he wrote fifteen years ago. In the course of his article, he takes Professor Dowden to task for his alleged deficiency in knowledge of the principles of comparative literature, and then proceeds to make the following arraignment of men of letters in general for their lack of love for truth:

"On the mere man of letters little reliance can be placed either for the discovery of new truths or for the fearless diffusion of truths already known. Habituated to a knowledge of words rather than of things, too much the servant of fancies and too little the master of facts, he rarely shows any desire to know the truth for the pure pleasure of knowing it, and still more rarely does he strive to convert into conduct of every-day life the best knowledge within his reach. Some old and now worthless theory of physical nature, or of plant life, or of animal life, or of social man, or of individual man, for him is alike true and beautiful if it but minister to his decorative art. A glamour of falsehood has

always charmed the literary world; and, tho the false charms are not now perhaps so bewitching as when Sidney answered Stephen Gosson in 'An Apologie for Poetrie,' not now so deadly as when the poetic philosopher of Greece proposed to banish the poets from his ideal Commonwealth, still the old literary disregard of truths is to-day a fatal obstacle to the mere literary man's scientific progress. The man of letters is still blind to the fact that even the imagination he so ignorantly worships has done and is doing far nobler work in the domain of scientific truths than any his own bewildered realm can show; and he still resents with childish petulance every reminder that the pretensions of his unregulated imagination are doomed to the same fate as the exploded theories of the inspired poet and the heaven-born genius."

THE ECLIPSE OF A GREAT REPUTATION.

LITERARY history, altho it presents numberless instances

of once great reputations which have now passed away, contains scarcely any example of literary eclipse or death more remarkable than that of Mr. Philip Bailey, author of the epic poem "Festus," who was once heralded by thousands of readers and by many critics as another Milton. This poem appeared in 1839, and passed through eleven editions in England and more than thirty in America; yet its author, now an old man of eighty-five, has been living so completely forgotten at Nottingham, England, that most of those who still remember his former fame thought that he had long ago passed away, until he was recalled to mind very recently by the announcement that Glasgow University had bestowed on him the unusual compliment of a degree of LL.D. in absentia.

There are, however, indications that his poem may once more gain attention from the world, and a writer in the London Academy even went so far lately as to prophesy a speedy "Festus revival." Such an event would not be wholly unprecedented, for Milton's fame, partly under the deadening influence of Restoration fashions, suffered a great decline in the years between his death and the opening decade of the eighteenth century. Indeed, in spite of Dryden's contemporary appreciation of his genius, it was not until the appearance of Addison's series of appreciative papers in The Spectator in 1712 that Milton's transcendent merit was truly appreciated by his fellow countrymen of all classes.

In The Academy (London, May 25), Mr. F. B. Money-Coutts, a nephew of the well-known philanthropist, Baroness BurdettCoutts, and himself a poet, writes of this unique poem and its author. "To have spent one's life," says the writer, "in a great work, supposing one has any qualifications for it, is of itself a great achievement; and, assuredly, allowing for all eccentricities of individual opinion, not one of those very few persons who have studied 'Festus' would dare to assert that Mr. Bailey had no qualifications for that great attempt. On the contrary, they are all far more likely to have been amazed at the wealth of poetic power the work displays." Mr. Money-Coutts says further:

"That the devotion of Mr. Bailey's life has resulted in a most noble poem of an epic character, and yet full of sublime reasoning, will be as apparent as it was to Lord Tennyson and Mr. Robert Browning to any one who is conversant with fine poetry and who can surmount the difficulty of the absolutely vile punctuation to which poor Mr. Bailey's work has been subjected. . . Certainly a poem of some 700 closely printed pages, most evilly punctuated, and dealing largely with philosophic conceptions of the nature of the Deity, is one not likely to tempt the present 'public' Besides, instead of condensing, Mr. Bailey has, perhaps unfortunately, enlarged his work in every new edition. The fifth edition (1854) contained about 20, 100 lines, the tenth about 35,000, and the last (1893) about 41,250!"

The poem takes us wheeling through space, visiting planets, and introduces to us a Lucifer "who is in some respects a finer and more dignified conception than Goethe's, and an immeasur

ably more subtle one than Milton's boastful dragon." Indeed, according to the writer, Byron, in his "Cain,” alone rivals Mr. Bailey in the representation of this character. We quote further:

“Festus is Man himself, just as Job is Man, or Prometheus is Man. He passes through all experiences-joy, sorrow, sin, death-as a precious metal passes through the alembic. He is the Soul doomed not to descend, but to ascend-a painful doom, tho in the endless climb the torture may become transmuted into a joy far greater than happiness. For this is how the Soul climbs:

Now clinging to grim steeps, -the lichen gray
Scarce closelier; steeps that in the paling light
Smile treacherous welcome, even as death might smile,
Petting the plumes of some surprised soul.

The exquisite touch about Death is anticipated in an earlier

passage:

She is silent in the hand of death;
Soothed by his touch perchance, like a young bird
Dreadless, incredulous of cruel fate.

But, or rather, therefore, round about Man, not in spite of, but in consequence of his strange and painful pilgrimage, are always the everlasting arms:

There's not the tiniest lifelet flecks the a'
With wing invisible,

but in his coat

Quarters the arms of God.

But this image, tho so lovely, does not illustrate the poet's faith so well as this far finer one:

As, when o'er vast

And shoreward flats at murkiest noon of night,
No single element, not high heaven, not earth,
Not sea is visible, one wide-searching wind,
Sign solitary of life, blows, blows; so sweeps

Through death's unsubstanced state, God's vital thought. "Opportunity does not now serve me to dive deeper into this great poet's mind. That his verse is sometimes rugged I admit, especially when all the stops are either absent or in the wrong place; but it is folly to suppose that a long journey can be taken without going up and down hill, unless it be over the monotonies of sea or desert; and it is precisely the transition from mountain to plain and from valley to peak that interests us; not the level beauty, but the sudden glory that arrests us. Mr. Bailey's

life-work deserves, not an ephemeral comment, but a volume of earnest analysis. It is hard to imagine that his voice, like the unanswered one that he describes, will be

Wasted, like time, upon unquickened stars. Rather, let us hope, it may still help many of us to realize these other lines of his :

When we have hoped, sought, striven, and lost our aim,
Then the truth fronts us, beaming out of darkness
Like a white brow through its overshadowing hair.

NOTES.

THE city of Lichfield, England, is taking official steps to make a new literary shrine. One of the aldermen has given the money to purchase the house, No. 1 Market-place, where Dr. Samuel Johnson was born, and it has now become the property of the corporation. Here is to be gathered a collection of Johnsoniana, and a general appeal is made to the public for books, pictures, manuscripts, and other relics of the great dictator. Articles are to be sent to the town clerk, Litchfield, England.

NEW YORK is to have ten weeks of opera next season, and it is announced that in every way Mr. Grau has materially strengthened his company. He will bring it to America and remain here six months and will travel from Canada to New Orleans, and west to San Francisco. The present plans include the presentation of several new operas, among them De Sara's "Messaline" and Paderewski's "Manru." As given in the New York Herald, the Grau Opera Company will comprise the following: "As sopranos, Mmes. Calvé. Eames, Ternina, Lucienne Breval, Gadski, Suzanne Adams, and Fritzi-Scheff; contraltos, Mmes. Schumann-Heink, Bridewell, and Homer. The tenors include Alvarez, Van Dyck, De Marci, Gibert (a newcomer from the Opéra Comique and Grand Opéra, Paris), Dippel and Salignac. Mr. Grau has also secured Albert Reiss, a new light tenor, who scored an unequaled success in the rôle of 'Mime' at Covent Garden. As baritones Mr. Grau has Scotti, Campanari, Bispham, Muhlmann, and Declery, a newcomer; and as basses Plançon. Journet, and Blass. For conductors Mr. Grau has Flon, Walter Damrosch, and Sepilli." Others who will in all probability be in the company are: Mmes. Sembrich, Sybil Sanderson and Lilli Lehmann, Herr Van Rooy, and last but certainly not least, Edouard de Reszke.

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

DIRECTION OF THE EARTH'S DEVELOPMENT.

HA

AVE the living species on the earth's surface developed in one direction only or in more than one? Since the earth has two poles and only two, it has been thought that its development must have been symmetrical with these; in other words, that all the phenomena of progress in the northern hemisphere must have had their correspondences in the southern. This has been called the "theory of bipolarity." In Cosmos (May 18), M. Paul Combes argues that it is not upheld by the facts. The northern and southern hemispheres are not at all alike, he says, and development has been "monopolar," or solely from north to south. M. Combes writes:

"The hypothesis of bipolarity may be formulated in the following terms:

"The Antarctic pole presents physical conditions almost equal to those of the Arctic pole, therefore the two polar fauna should be nearly identical.

"Our ignorance of the austral fauna has been the principal ar

ited by primitive living species arising at the North Pole and driven successively southward by new emigrants.

"On the vegetable side, the tree-ferns of the coal-period, and the Protacea of Australia and South Africa and other types as remarkable, may be mentioned.

"Among animals, there are the lemurians and the epyornis of Madagascar, the marsupials of Australia, the dinornis and the kiwi of New Zealand, etc.

'Among human beings there are the Bushmen of South Africa, the Australian natives, the Fuegians, etc.

"It can not be said that these inferior races correspond with the Arctic Esquimaux, as demanded by the bipolarity theory, for the Bushmen and Australians live in temperate regions where they would have been able to attain a higher rank in civilization if they had not been 'primitive residues.'

"Therefore we believe in monopolarity'; that is to say, in one single center of creation whence plants, animals, and man have extended progressively from North to South. Bipolarity is condemned by the facts."-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

CAN CLOTHING CARRY DISEASE?

ration of the Arctic regions has been extended already to 82° north latitude, we have not until recently gone farther toward the South Pole, so far as natural-history observations are concerned, than the Kerguelen islands, and the observations made here have seemed to support the theory.

...

"Now it is well known that the Belgica penetrated very much farther into the neighborhood of the Pole. . . . The expedition found new species of marine animals. . . . What is the important fact to be noted here? It is that each pole has its peculiar fauna and that the bipolarity theory is completely false. But, it may be asked, of what importance is this proof? What difference does it make whether the fauna are bipolar or monopolar? . . . . It is not without interest to see hypotheses replaced by facts, especially when those facts agree with the general data of geology and with all that we know with accuracy regarding the stocking of the globe with animal and vegetable species and with man. "Everything indicates, or at least seems to indicate, a continuous development from the North Pole toward the South Pole: (1) The form of the continents; (2) the richness of vegetable and animal life around the North Pole in former geologic periods; (3) what we may call the 'residual' forms of life at the southern extremities of all continents.

(1) If we examine a globe we shall see that the continental masses are considerably extended toward the north and that they are widened along the parallels of latitude so that they touch each other, or nearly so. They thus surround, at the approaches to the Arctic circle, a central polar sea, forming a basin enclosed by a broken belt of land or of islands whose exploration has hardly been carried out, but whose existence and arrangement can not be doubted.

"Passing toward the south, we see that these masses, which are connected toward the north (North America, Europe, and Northern Asia) are prolonged respectively by three extensionsSouth America, Africa, and Australia-which gradually taper to points in a boundless sea, the Southern Ocean, long before reaching the Antarctic polar circle.

"We shall see the results of this arrangement from the point of view of the dissemination of living beings.

"(2) What little we know of the geology and paleontology of the Arctic regions enables us to affirm that later than the carboniferous period this part of the globe has been the seat of an intense and luxuriant vegetation, constantly renewed during geologic periods and extending southward as the gradual cooling of the earth forced the plant life into lower latitudes.

"Animal emigration must have followed that of the plants, and we are even beginning to suspect that the Arctic regions must have witnessed the first appearance of the human species. "Consequently, we may look upon the development and movement of life on the globe as the result of successive waves of vegetable and animal life pushed southward by the constant decrease of temperature, the latest comers driving their predecessors before them little by little, to the extremity of the continents. . . . (3) Thus, all the southern continental extremities are inhab

gerated. The notion that infection is carried by clothes is held by almost every one, and wonderful tales, as The Hospital reminds us, are told about bits of flannel, old petticoats, and other articles of clothing, which, after being exposed to scarlet fever, have been put away for years, only to set up fresh outbreaks of disease when restored to service. "The daily life of every doctor appears to give the lie to any such idea," says The Hospital, and it quotes from a paper read recently by Dr. Doty, health officer of the port of New York, before the American Public Health Association, in which he held that infectious diseases are rarely communicated by means of clothing. Dr. Doty reaches this conclusion from observations made as health officer during a continued experience of twenty years with infectious disease. Says the Doctor:

"As a matter of fact these views are apparently indorsed by the medical profession both in private practice and in matters relating to public health, inasmuch as physicians daily visit infectious diseases and go from them directly to other patients without disinfection or change of clothing. Moreover, health departments throughout the country permit their inspectors and diagnosticians to visit infectious disease in the same manner. . . . In families where scarlet fever exists the adult members, who are actively employed outside, are allowed to continue their business without interruption. Of course they are usually admonished not to enter the apartment of the sick when at home, but in a large percentage of cases the patient roams about the house or apartment at will. Therefore, if the clothing worn by well persons were a medium of infection to the extent which is commonly believed, we would certainly and surely have indisputable evidence of it, which we do not."

Dr. Doty admits that infection may in some cases be transmitted through clothing, but he holds that this does not commonly occur, and that in making regulations for the protection of health we much not give it undue consideration. On this the writer of The Hospital article comments as follows:

"We think that on the whole Dr. Doty is right. . . . It is obvious enough that infection by the clothing of 'well people' only rarely occurs, and we take it that in this matter the element of time and the amount of exposure have much to do with the result. We are constantly being asked by nurses, 'Why all this fuss when the doctor goes in and out without taking any precautions?' and if we were to admit the theory of mediate contagion in its extreme degree it must be confessed that no answer would be forthcoming. But we must consider the shortness of the doctor's visit and the comparatively small opportunity of direct infection of his clothes, compared with the prolonged exposure and intimate contact with the patient which occurs in the case of the Still it must be confessed that the possibility of infection being carried by the medical attendant has always been some

nurse.