WHAT IRVING HAS DONE FOR THE STAGE. THE HE recent performance in this city, by Sir Henry Irving, Miss Ellen Terry, and the London Lyceum Company, of Mr. Comyns Carr's play "King Arthur" is spoken of by The Century, in its "Topics of the Time," as "a complete demonstration of the falsity and absurdity of the various pleas advanced by the majority of our so-called managers in extenuation of their failure to provide wholesome and rational entertainment." These autocrats of the footlights, says the article in question, claim that they are obliged to cater to the public taste; that there is no popular demand for or appreciation of the serious, poetic, romantic, or literary drama; that they produce the best plays to be had in the market; and that they can not justly be held responsible for the lack of able playwrights and competent actors. It is claimed that the exact reverse of all this is the fact. The editor proceeds: "As we have pointed out in previous articles on this subject, the public has no voice in the selection of the theatrical fare set before it, but invariably patronizes the best dishes, of whatever kind they may happen to be; whereas our managers, with very few exceptions, do not know good from bad, have no independence of judgment, and are absolutely terrified by anything like originality on the part of an unknown author. They have discouraged native writers by importing nearly all their plays from Paris or London, and have stunted the artistic growth of young actors by a system which debars them largely from opportunities of proper training. "If Sir Henry Irving had been a manager of this kind, instead of being a man of force, ambition, and intellect, devoted to his profession and resolved to establish its right to a place among the arts, he would not now be the most famous actor playing at this time, as he undoubtedly is, in spite of his faults; nor would the London Lyceum be the only real dramatic school worth talking about in the English-speaking world. What is and what has been the secret of his success? Not his dramatic genius, for no actor of his eminence has owed so little to natural inspiration. Not inherited fame, for he is the first of his family to win renown upon the stage. Not chance, for his upward progress has been slow and steady, and from the first he has been the architect of his own fortunes. The simple explanation is that he has had faith in the eagerness of the public to patronize the best work, and courage enough to act upon his convictions. This may sound like a truism, but it is one that can not be insisted upon too strongly. There never was an actor who has been assailed more vigorously or more persistently by the critics than he. His warmest admirers must admit that he has essayed characters for which he is unfitted physically and temperamentally; and yet, in spite of occasional personal failures, his managerial career has been one long and unbroken record of triumphant prosperity." Noting the fact that many of the most striking characteristics of Irving's liberal and enlightened theories of management were exemplified in his representation of "King Arthur," the editor says: "The public crowded the house at every performance, altho the ordinary prices of the seats had been nearly doubled. Yet it appealed, not to that love of the morbid, the sensational, the grotesque, or the vulgar which is supposed by our modern managers to dominate the popular mind, but to the natural admiration, common to mankind at large, of what is beautiful, romantic, poetic, heroic, or ennobling. If the play had been presented through the combined efforts of a check-book, a dry-goods house, a decorator, and the ordinary stage manager only, the appeal probably would have been made in vain; altogether too much would have been left to the imagination. Sir Henry Irving knew how to surround the personages of the playwright with the atmosphere and spirit of the place and period to which they were assigned. To secure all possible accuracy and consistency in the designs of the costumes and scenery he employed the services of one of the greatest experts in such matters-Sir Edward BurneFor the incidental music, used with such admirable Jones. effect, he went to one of the most popular and gifted of modern composers, Arthur Sullivan. To the general preparation he contributed his own extraordinary intelligence and energy, his keen sense of pictorial and dramatic effect, and his intense appreciation of the value of minute detail. The result was an entertainment of the rarest excellence in all its distinctive features, whether literary, artistic, or theatrical." SAD CONDITION OF "THE POET'S CORNER" IT T will be remembered that Addison, when he felt in "a serious mood," was in the habit of resorting to the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey-that place of "poets that have no monuments, and monuments that have no poets"-and how the condition of those who lie there filled him with melancholy. It is suggested by The Westminster Gazette that if the gentle essayist were to visit his favorite haunt at the present time he would find occasion for further melancholy at the condition of some of the tombs of departed immortals. The London Times recently complained of the state of affairs now prevailing there, whereupon The Westminster Gazette sent an agent to investigate. We extract the following from his report: 'When I arrived first at Poets' Corner I found it tenanted by a Frenchman and a lady of the same nationality, who were attempting, apparently in vain, to decipher, with the help of a much-flourished guide-book, the characters upon an at first sight perfectly black slab. On going up afterward I found that there were just visible the letters Richard Brin-.' Was this the tomb of Sheridan? Close by were the graves of Johnson and Garrick. Garrick's tablet was characteristically gay and unconcealed, flaunting its burnished gilt lettering, while by its side, in somber contrast, lay that of his old schoolmaster, plain, dusty, cracked, and half-hidden by a bench. Not far away was Handel's slab. This was even less visible, but not quite in the same condition as Johnson's, and the musician had, of course, his effigy placed on high amid its pile of trumpets and fiddles. The care of relatives had served to keep the letters on Dickens's grave fairly bright, but not even that could keep back the tide of benches. As for poor Macaulay, one had to crane one's neck underneath two or three pews to be able to learn from his epitaph that his 'name would live for evermore.' and all this time, worshipers were sating themselves with the view of elaborate monuments raised to no doubt estimable nonentities that have crowded into the sacred corner. The huge tablet, for instance, to Mary Hope, erected in the last century by her husband, whose 'grief' happily 'forbade him to name her virtues;' of the great marble testimony raised by Edward Atkins, Esq., of the same period, to the erudition of his ancestors, some of whom appear to have been more or less distinguished in the legal profession, but the last and greatest of all 'learned in the polite literature and antiquities of the country,' and 'author of a history of Gloucestershire;' or the bust and tablet to the more aristocratic Baroness Lechmore, whose only claim to renown appears to be her having 'intermarried with' one Sir Thomas Robinson, with the effect that the latter 'erected this monument with a grateful sense of the pleasure he had in the conversation of an accomplished woman.'" The newspaper representative found his way into the apart ments of Dean Bradley, whom he discovered in the act of looking over an attack in The Lancet on the overcrowding at services in the Abbey. Among other things the Dean said: "No one could possibly be more anxious than I that Johnson's and the other graves should be kept sacred, but it must be remembered that the Abbey is, before everything, a place of worship; indeed, I myself have been sometimes blamed for not seeming to regard it enough in that light. As a matter of fact, we really must sometimes let the seats cover up even some of the graves in Poets' Corner. There is nowhere else where they can be put, our services are so crowded. I tried putting chairs in the center aisle of the choir; but there were many objections to that, besides the fact that it transformed the exit of the choir into a sort of scramble. Then we have had to put seats, too, right round the corner from the north transept into the nave, where people can not possibly hear much, while as for the nave itself-I don't think there are many places there where the sermon can be heard. Even as it is, it is only on Sundays and specially crowded days that the graves mentioned are hidden by pews, and if they were not so they would be covered by people standing." JOHN OLIVER HOBBES (MRS. CRAIGIE). delicate and passionate amateur,' since with Mrs. Craigie literary work is not a means, but an end. Her father, John Morgan Richards, is a prominent member of the American colony in London, a millionaire, and a pillar of Dr. Joseph Parker's City Temple. His fine house at Lancaster Gate, Hyde Park, which is Mrs. Craigie's home, is a center not only for American visitors, but for the leading lights of the social and intellectual world of London. Reputation has come early to Mrs. Craigie, for she is still only twenty-eight. Her talent was precocious. At eighteen she wrote letters to a London weekly, signed 'Diogenes Pessimus,' which brought her an offer of an assistant editorship. She is remarkably versatile. She has studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, and classics at King's College in London. She talks well upon all the topics of the day, from the Armenian question to the cut of a débutante's frock. Not long ago she made a pilgrimage to Hawarden, where she read her play 'Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting' to Mr. Gladstone. She is fond of society, and declares that she does not find it nearly so full of bores as the caricaturists would have one believe. Her unhappy marriage has been the one sad side of this brilliant woman's life. Last year she obtained a divorce from her husband-a Bank of England official-in order to secure possession of her child, a boy of five." Beethoven's Heroic Symphony.-The title that Beethoven gave the Heroic Symphony has provoked much discussion, and there have been many endeavors to explain it. The Saturday Review says: "Wagner tried less to explain its meaning than to explain it away. Chained to his one idea, he asserted that Beethoven's hero was not a military hero, but a young man of complete spiritual and physical endowment, who passed from mere brute delight in life and his strength through tragic suffering to a high spiritual satisfaction in love; that is to say, he asserted that Beethoven's hero was Parsifal or Siegfried. Now this much of Wagner's theory is true, that Beethoven would not worship a mere human butcher any more than he would worship a pork butcher as a hero. On the other hand, Beethoven's hero was undoubtedly a military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. know that the symphony was originally dedicated to Napoleon, that the dedication was altered when Napoleon (as Beethoven We thought) turned traitor and became emperor; we know that when the news of his death came Beethoven casually remarked that he had already composed the music for that event. Of what parts, then, of Napoleon's career do the first and last two movements tell? These are questions which can never be answered; and, mere curiosity apart, it so happens that it matters little whether they are answered or not answered, so long as they are not answered altogether wrongly. For whatever events Beethoven might at any moment have in his mind, he never tried to depict them, but only to communicate the emotion they aroused. He himself said as much. It is in the expression of human emotion he is supreme, and to feel aright the emotions of the Heroic Symphony we need only have our minds clear of a story which Beethoven did not and could not have had in his mind." Classic Slang."It is a matter of current observation and remark that the slang of to-day is orthodox literature to-morrow, says Mr. R. W. Conant, in The Dial. "But it is not so commonplace that modern slang can often 'point with pride' to most aristocratic lineage away back in classic Greek and Latin. Literature repeats itself, as well as history, and everything else; for they all come from the human soul, itself an eternal unity of variety. This bond between past and present may be illustrated by a few examples out of many. We moderns are not the first to find things which 'make us tired,' for Virgil, speaking doubtless from a rich personal experience, complains that 'Juno makes earth and Heaven tired.' His description of a city riot, in which he says 'rocks fly,' is twin brother to the reportorial railway strike, wherein coupling-pins always 'fly.' Cicero might have been a Roman from Cork, when he speaks of a power of silver and gold;' and he is forever 't'rowing Catiline out' (of the city). Cæsar says that Ariovistus 'had taken to himself such airs that he seemed unendurable.' Our word 'business,' which is so convenient to piece out conversational poverty with more or less legitimate uses, is a prime favorite with both Cicero and Cæsar. The following phrases are quite Chicagoese: 'An opportune time for finishing the business' (of destroying the enemy's fleet): 'What business had Cæsar in Gaul?' 'They undertook the business' (of arresting the Allobroges), etc. Xenophon gives us in Greek the same phrase as Cicero in Latin, for he says, 'Tissaphernes threw out others' (of the refugees from the city). He seems like an elder brother when he declares, 'I made a find,' and 'They were like to wonder.' Stevenson as a Poet.-"Many of his friends and admirers, and perhaps even Mr. Stevenson himself, believed that his achievement in verse was by no means inconsiderable. Yet the greater public could never be induced to regard the author of 'Kidnapped' as a poet, and resolutely refused to look upon his poems as anything but interesting experiments in rime. That there was an implied compliment in this neglect may fairly be upheld. They would not call him a minor poet, and they could not call him a great one, so they would not think of him as a poet at all. Tho we are far from insensible to the subtle charm which Mr. Stevenson knew how to weave into his numbers, we can not doubt that here, as so often, the public judged rightly. Mr. Stevenson was not a poet, and they knew it; and he knew that they knew it, or at any rate thought it, and hence he never approached them quite confidently or whole-heartedly when he used rime and measure as his medium. If anything about so remarkable an artist could be amateurish it was his verse. "A curious feature of Mr. Stevenson's verse which can not fail to be noticed by any one who examines it closely and critically, is its essentially imitative character. Mr. Stevenson seems constantly to be borrowing some other bard's harp and playing on it after the original master's manner. No doubt the imitation is done with great tact and great discretion, and always with taste, but none the less the sense of imitation as opposed to originality is there. Mr. Stevenson, in the attractive account which he has given us of how he formed his prose-style, narrates that he used to take some great writer-Hazlitt or Sir Thomas Browne-and then for weeks play what he calls 'the sedulous ape'-i.e., imitate till he had mastered the secret of the author's style. In prose, no doubt, Mr. Stevenson succeeded in distilling by this process a wonderful and original style of his own. In his verse the last stage does not seem to have been reached-the stage which blends the compound into a new thing, and does away with the feeling that it is a mere unassimilated mixture. In the verse signs of the sedulous ape' process are always cropping up."The Spectator, January 18. THE SCIENCE. WHAT ARE THE X RAYS? The HE wonderful sub-surface photography discovered by Professor Röntgen of Würzberg has not yet ceased to attract popular attention, and the indications are that even after discussion of it has ceased in the daily papers and among non-technical persons, it and the subjects connected with it will still form subjects for continued experiment in thousands of laboratories. Even now the philosopher begins to make his voice heard. cry is now not so much-"What will the new rays do?" as "What are they?" and, as might have been predicted, the answers are manifold. The well-known phenomena of the Crookes tube, familiar for many years, are yet a subject of dispute, and it could hardly be expected that the youngest and most remarkable of them all would be understood in a day. Some of the various attempts at explanation, many of them the tentative suggestions thrown out by professors in hurried interviews, are collected in an article in The Electrical World, February 8, part of which we quote below: "Dr. Pupin, of Columbia College, in an interview with a reporter of the New York Recorder, said that 'Dr. Röntgen's discovery, to put the whole story in a nutshell, is that the old cathode, or negative pole streamers, known to us for the last forty years, produce a strong fluorescence in a glass vacuum tube. STEEL RAZOR WITH HORN HANDLE, IN ITS CASE. Dr. Röntgen has discovered that, in addition to the fluorescent light, there is another form of radiations which penetrates all bodies, and casts a reflection or silhouette, varying in distinctness according to the character of the matter through which it passes, upon a sensitive photographic plate, placed beyond the object. What the possibilities of this new discovery may prove to be we can not yet estimate. I should class it as one of the highest importance. Prof. Edwin H. Hall, of Harvard University, in the New York Sun, sums up the facts concerning Röntgen's phenomena as follows: "(a) That the so-called rays are sent out from the cathode of a vacuum tube, excited by a powerful alternating or rapidly interrupted current of electricity. "(b) That these 'rays' act readily through wood and flesh, less readily through metals, except the lightest of metals, aluminum, and hardly at all through ordinary glass. (c) That the 'rays' are not perceptibly reflected or refracted. (d) That a medium, a solution of iodine, which absorbs the short ultra-violet rays, does not allow the Röntgen influence to pass, and a medium, a solution of alum, which absorbs long waves, does allow the Röntgen influence to pass. Mr. Swinton, an English experimenter. This is from (e) That the rays' are not affected by the magnet. "The hypotheses are: (a) That the 'rays' are propagated by vibrations of greater length than those of ordinary light. Against this hypothesis we must put an experiment of Mr. Swinton. (b) That the 'rays' are ultra-violet rays. But ultra-violet rays are called such merely because they are refracted more than the violet rays, which are themselves the most refrangible rays of the visible spectrum. As the Röntgen 'rays' are apparently not refracted at all, it is difficult to see how they can be ultra-violet rays. (c) That they are rays of longitudinal vibration. It is hard to see how they would differ essentially from the electric oscillations, or displacement currents, set up in the space between the plates of an electric condenser, a Leyden jar, for instance, when Therefore it the charge upon the plates is rapidly reversed. seems that we already know something about the behavior of such vibrations, and there seems to be no reason whatever why 'rays' propagated by such vibrations should not pass with great readiness through glass. But the Röntgen 'rays' act through ordinary glass with great difficulty, and it is very doubtful whether they can be explained by means of longitudinal vibrations." It should be remembered that the 'rays' produce no effect on the eye, and it has been questioned whether they produce any direct effect on the photographic plate. They cause fluorescence and the photographs may be taken by the fluorescent light generated on the surface of the plate-not by the quasi-luminous action of the rays themselves. It is natural that we should turn to the original paper in which Professor Röntgen himself describes his discovery. Parts of this are thus summarized in the article from which we have already quoted: "Professor Röntgen did not succeed in deflecting the dark rays by a magnet, which up to now has been a characteristic of the cathode ray. He concludes from this and other considerations that the former rays are not identical with cathode rays, but may be generated by the latter at the glass wall of the discharge ap paratus. "He does not believe that the new rays are in reality ultraviolet light, as they do not possess some of the distinctive characteristics of the latter. In conclusion Professor Röntgen says that there seems to be some connection between the new rays and light rays in the shadow of pictures, and the fluorescing and chemical activity of both kinds of rays. It has long been known that besides the transverse light vibrations, longitudinal vibrations might take place in ether, and, according to the views of different physicists, must take place. Certainly their existence has not up to now been made evident, and their properties have not been on that account experimentally investigated. May not the new rays be due to longitudinal vibrations in the ether? Professor Röntgen states that he puts more and more faith in this idea and, therefore, announces it, tho it requires further corrob oration. "The London Electrician of January 24 contains an abstract of a paper by G. Jaumann in Wiedemann's Annalen for January, in which he adduces arguments to show that cathode rays are longitudinal electric oscillations, altho a radial or tangential transversiality may be superposed. The existence of longitudinal electric waves is not admitted by the Maxwell-Hertzian equations, but almost any change whatever made in them, he says, makes their existence possible. It is stated that cathode rays can not be identical with ultra-violet rays, from which they are distinguished by totally different properties." In conclusion it should be said that similar effects have quite lately been produced by simple electromagnetic radiation, without the intervention of the Crookes tube. Thus it is possible that there may be an intimate connection between the two phenomena, as suggested in THE LITERARY DIGEST in our comments on the earliest reports of Professor Röntgen's experiments. But quite enough has been quoted above to show the reader that there is plenty of work for the physical laboratories, even if they are to do nothing but sift the tenable from the untenable among the various theories already put forward on this fascinating subject. THE BURNING-GLASS IN SURGERY.-Dr. Shepherd in The Yale Medical Journal advises the use of the sun-glass for the removal of growths where the formation of a scar is particularly objectionable. He applies cocain and then focuses the rays of the sun on the growth through a suitable lens. MOST WAVES OF THE OCEAN. OST persons understand by the word "wave" the familiar breaker of the shore, yet he who has seen only these has never seen a typical wave, for as soon as a water-wave gets into shallow water it becomes modified. Real waves, unaffected by local conditions, can be seen only at sea. Some interesting scientific facts about these great water-waves are presented in a popular way by Vaughan Cornish in an article in Knowledge, January. We quote a few paragraphs below: "A breeze which travels at rather more than half a mile an hour just ruffles the water, darkening the surface, which no longer reflects like a mirror; but if the breeze drops the wavelets instantly cease and the water resumes its glassy look. If, on the other hand, the breeze increases until it has a velocity of about two miles an hour, permanent waves begin to rise, which increase in size as the wind continues to blow. The form of the waves in a rising sea is somewhat different from the smoothly sloping curve of a ground swell, for whilst the waves are rising the crests are exposed excessively to the force of the wind, and the troughs are sheltered. The tops of the waves are consequently driven forward, and break at the crests into the 'white horses' which chase each other across a rising sea. At first the wind increases the height of the waves over every part of the sea upon which it blows, but after a time the waves near the windward shore attain such dimensions that the power of the wind is only sufficient to maintain, without increasing, them. Further to leeward the waves are still increasing, and still show the 'white horses.' However long a wind of constant strength may blow, the height to which it can raise the waves in any part of the sea is limited, being greater, however, as the distance from the windward shore increases. This increase in the size of the waves can readily be explained, for at any place the sea is raised not only by the force of the wind there, but also by the energy transmitted from the leeward waves. Off the coasts of Britain the greatest wavesgreatest not only in height, but more especially in length from crest to crest-come rolling in from the broad Atlantic. The narrow seas of the English Channel give shorter, lower waves: often steep and breaking at the crest; choppy, lumpy, sometimes, dangerous and always disagreeable, but lacking the majesty of the great ocean waves. It is with the short, steep waves that most of our pictures have to do; very few artists have painted the long rolling waves of the open Atlantic. "In order to understand waves we must study, not only the motion of the wave, z.e., the steady onward rush of the wavecrest, but also the motion of a particle of surface-water situated in the path of the wave. Some information as to the motion of the water-particle may be gained by watching from a pier the movements of a light floating body outside the line of breakers. When a wave-crest approaches, the body moves upward and forward; then, at the crest of the wave, it is for a moment moving forward only; when the crest passes it moves first downward and forward, then downward and backward, and, in the trough of the wave the body is again in its first position and is for a moment moving horizontally backward, i.e., seaward, before rising again as the next wave-crest approaches. More exact agreeing with mathematical calculation shows that the motion of the particle is, in deep water, almost perfectly circular, the diameter of the circle being in the direction in which the wave is traveling. The particle of water moves with uniform velocity, and the time of one complete swing of the particle round its circle is equal (as follows from what has been already said) to the interval between the passage of succeeding wave-crests. The vertical distance through which the particle moves is equal to the height from trough to crest. Again, from the fact that the motion is circular, it follows that the particle moves through a horizontal distance equal to the height of the wave from trough to crest, not (be it well understood) equal to the wave-length, or distance from crest to crest. "The velocity of the particle, it must be remembered, is by no means the velocity of the wave. The particle takes the same time to move uniformly round its small circle that a wave-crest takes to pass over a whole wave-length-say ten times the distance, even in a very rough sea. "The depths of the ocean are undisturbed by the waves with which the wind covers the surface, for the excursions of the swing ing particles diminish very rapidly as the distance from the surface increases. In an Atlantic storm-wave, with surface particles swinging round a circle of forty-foot diameter, the motion at a depth of three hundred feet is calculated to be not more than half an inch; so that we may say that at a depth greater than the distance from crest to crest the water is undisturbed by winds, and, conversely, where there is such a clear depth of water the formation and the motion of the largest wind-waves is not hindered or modified by the sea bottom. Some seas, however, are really very shallow. The depth of the North Sea is not more than half the distance from crest to crest of a full-grown Atlantic wave; it would be difficult to find a spot in the North Sea where St. Paul's Cathedral would be completely submerged." C ARITHMETICAL CALCULATIONS BY MACHINERY. ALCULATING machines are by no means new inventions. Some have been in use for many years, and they have saved much toil in the way of tiresome mechanical arithmetical work. Most machines of the kind, however, are complicated and expensive. A comparatively new form, which is described in La Nature January 4) by the editor, M. Gaston Tissandier, is worthy of mention on account of its comparative simplicity. We translate M. Tissandier's description and reproduce his illustrations below: "The calculating machine called 'La Rapide' serves to perform the four fundamental rules of arithmetic, and more particularly 1, Perspective view of a disk turning a numbered, wheel; 2, the same disk seen from the side; 3, the apparatus. multiplication and division. It will multiply nine digits by eight, if we are content with 13 digits in the product-quite sufficient for small calculations, and 1o digits by 9 when a product of 18 digits is desired. "The motor axle bears 9 disks so arranged as to cause figures to appear, by means of their cogs, in the little holes made for the purpose on the right of the lower part of the device. Each cogged disk bears a lever. The extremities of the 9 levers appear at the outside of the machine in slots, each of which has the 9 digits written alongside. These levers bear each 9 teeth. When one of these teeth is engaged by the movement of the handle, there issues from the disk a rod which acts on the cogs of a wheel that communicates with another wheel numbered from o to 9. Between each two of these last wheels is a piece that does not act till they have made one complete' turn, that is, till after the 9 of the wheel has appeared. This piece then presses against a little cleat fixed by a spring to the disks, in the upper part of the machine. At the moment when this piece has pressed against the shank, this last acts on the neighboring wheel to the left, which, advancing one tooth, causes the tens, hundreds, etc., to appear in the large holes at the right. "To perform a multiplication we indicate the multiplicand by means of the extremities of the levers on the edges of the slots and then turn the handle as many times as there are units in the last figure of the multiplier; then we push the sliding part of the machine one notch to the right and turn the handle a number of times corresponding to the figure representing the tens, and so on. The multiplier appears automatically at the left in the little holes, while the product appears at the right in the large holes of the lower part of the machine. "This lower part has at each end a winged screw that performs the office of eraser, changing by a single turn all the digits in the holes back to zero. These screws are fixed on the axle bearing the numbered disks; they act while there remains a single digit other than zero in the apertures. Finally a bell communicating with the last gearing informs the operator automatically that the machine has finished the operation and that after that moment it will not act. "For additions and multiplications the handle is turned from before backward; for subtractions and divisions the turning is in the opposite direction, as is shown by indicator arrows marked on the upper surface of the machine. "Turns of the handle forward, that is, in the subtractive direction, are indicated in the left-hand apertures by red figures, while for those in the additive sense the figures are white. This system allows of the multiplication, for instance, by ten less one, instead of by nine, which saves time. "The movable part of the machine slides in a slot made in the base of the machine; this slot bears 10 grooves into each of which can enter a point attached to the sliding part and serving to displace it, so that the disks for tens, hundreds, etc., will be successively acted upon. The motor axle has at its left end a cogwheel communicating by an intermediary with the numbering disk, which itself indicates through the little apertures the number of turns given to the handle. The numbered disks bear digits from 1 to 9, on one side in white, on the other in red, besides the zero, which is white. All the wheels of the machine are of steel. "This calculating machine was invented in 1892 by M. Odhner, after fifteen years of labor. The dimensions of the machine are as follows: length, 0.30 meter [1 foot]: width, 0.15 [6 inches]; height, 0.12 [5 inches]. It can perform all sorts of operationsaddition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square and cube root, interest, and exchange. The following operation: Swamp Plants on Dry Ground.-"It is remarkable," says Meehan's Monthly, "that, with very few exceptions, plants which are found naturally in wet or swampy places do much better when transplanted in comparatively dry garden ground. What is known as the Swamp Magnolia is a good illustration of this. Nowhere in its native swamps can any one see as large or healthy plants as are to be seen everywhere in gardens. The explanation is that the plants are in obedience to the law of nature that everything should be made use of. The swamps have to be made use of by nature as well as dry land, and it has been so ordered that the seeds of certain plants shall only sprout in comparatively moist places. The trees have, of course, to continue their existence where the seeds sprout. Nearly all the swamp plants that are found to grow so well in dry ground will not have their seed grow under such circumstances. The seeds themselves have to be planted in situations similar to that in which the plants grow naturally. Swamp maple, swamp magnolias, and the native holly are examples of plants found in swampy places, that flourish in dryer ground." A A POCKET ELECTRIC LAMP. GERMAN inventor, Herr Bohwinkel, has devised a form of electric incandescent lamp, with accompanying battery, compact enough to be carried about in the pocket. We translate a description of the device from Der Stein der Weisen (Vienna, January 1), and reproduce the accompanying pictures: "Such a lamp is shown in Fig. I; Figs. 2 and 3 represent the corresponding light-tubes of two different dimensions. These last, like that represented in Fig. 1, consist of two principal parts: that seen at the lower half, which in Fig. 1 is made as a flat flask but in Figs. 2 and 3 as tubes closed at the bottom, and that at the upper half, the battery, which by means of a screw is fastened air-tight to the other part. FIG. 1.-BOHWINKEL'S ELECTRIC POCKET LAMP. "The battery, which is called a 'revolver-battery', on account of its likeness to the chambers of a revolver, consists of three platinum zinc elements . . capable of giving a current of six volts and four to five amperes. Fastened to the poles are the wires of a glowlamp (see Fig. 3) which in Fig. 1 is covered with a globe of thick glass, and in Figs. 2 and 3, with a frame and lenses, and also fitted with reflectors, which increase the power of the light. When the lamp is to be used, the bottle or tube is filled with a patent battery-fluid and then screwed tight to the battery. By tipping up the lamp the fluid is brought into contact with the elements, generating a current and causing the filament to glow with a bright white light, which with the lamps shown in Figs. I and 2 will last continuously for an hour and a half and with Fig. 3 for three quarters of an hour, with one filling. FIG. 2. FIG. 3. POCKET LIGHT-TUBES. 101⁄2 x 2 inches. 7 X 2 inches. .. If the lamp be held upright, the fluid flows back into the bottle or tube, away from the battery, and the light goes out. One quart of the fluid is enough to fill the lamp sixteen times. The lamp may be carried either in the pocket or in a leather case fitted with straps."- Transla ted for THE LITERARY DIGEST. Diagnosis by Electric Sparks.-M. de Narkiwicz-lodko, Member of the Imperial Institute of Medicine at St. Petersburg, has recently brought to the attention of the Academy of Science, in Paris, a series of photographs of the electric spark, especially of sparks said to have been obtained by him from the surface of the human body. "These proofs," says The Medical Times, "take the form of a luminous ball, presenting more or less brilliancy, taking on delicate forms of arborescence, such as trees, plants, etc., according as to whether the subject may be anemic, nevous, sanguine, or exceptionally vigorous. In the latter case the image on the plate appears to be a veritable explosion of electric molecules." A ROYAL M.D.-The Queen of Portugal, the daughter of the late Comte de Paris, after two years of hard study has passed her medical examination with flying colors, and secured the degree of Doctor of Medicine, being the first lady of royal birth who has acquired the distinction of adding the letters M.D. to the Regina which follows her name. |