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SCIENCE.

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE MISTLETOE.

THE

HE mistletoe is perhaps the plant par excellence of Christmas tradition, more so probably than the holly, for the latter has only decorative uses, while the association of the former is with holiday festivity and mirth. We quote (Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, December) portions of an article that treats of this interesting plant from several points of view, historical, botanical, and social:

"No plant on earth has ever aroused so many kinds of interest on all possible grounds as the mystic mistletoe. Take it how you will, that strange shrub is a wonder. From every point of view it teems with curiosity. Its parasitic mode of growth, its paradoxical greenness among the bare boughs of winter, its pale and ghostly berries, its sticky fruit, filled full with viscid birdlime, have all aroused profound and respectful attention from the very earliest ages. Then its religious importance in so many countries and ages, its connection with Christmas and the mid-winter Saturnalia, its social survival to our own time as the Yuletide symbol, and its modern relation to the pleasing anachronism of indiscriminate kissing, all invest it alike with an additional factitious importance. Yet, strange to say, the full story of the mistletoe has never yet been written at any adequate length."

After telling us that from the evolutionist's point of view the plant may be a descendant of the honeysuckle family, tho it retains hardly a trace of the peculiarities of that family, and its origin and affinities still remain somewhat problematical, the author goes on as follows:

"The modern mistletoe, as we know it to-day, in its present highly evolved and degenerate state as a confirmed parasite, is no longer an enigma. It is a woody shrub, with yellowish-green leaves, which specially affects the branches of apple-trees, pears, and poplars. The people who get their ideas vaguely and at second-hand from books have a general notion, indeed, that the mistletoe's favorite haunt is the British oak; this is a complete mistake, as it was the very rarity of the mistletoe on oaks that gave one, when found there, its peculiar sanctity in the eyes of primitive peoples. In the purely wild condition, mistletoe grows mostly on poplars alone; in civilized and cultivated soils it extends its depredations, wherever it gets a chance, to apple orchards and pear-trees.

The

"And this is the manner of the generation of mistletoes. young seedlings sprout on a branch of their involuntary host, where the seed has been carried by birds in a way which I shall hereafter more fully describe, at its proper point in the lifehistory of the species. Instead of rooting themselves, however, like mere groundling plants, by small fibrous rootlets, they fasten by a sort of sucker-like process to the tissues of the tree on which they feed; and penetrating its bark to the living layer just beneath, suck up elaborated sap from the veins of their victim. Thus they live at the expense of the poplar, whose food they appropriate; and when many of them together infest a single tree, as one may often see in the long roadside avenues of central France, they succeed in largely strangling and choking the foliage of their unhappy host."

Of the curious sticky berries of the mistletoe much used for preparing birdlime, the author speaks as follows:

"The pulp surrounds a single solitary seed, for whose sake the whole mechanism has been developed by the parent plant. And this is the object subserved in the shrub's economy by the sticky material. Mistletoe berries are much sought after by sundry fruit-eating birds, but especially by the missel-thrush, which owes both its common English name and its scientific appellation of Turdus viscivorus [glue-eating thrush] to its marked affection for this mystic food. Now, as the bird eats the berries, it gets the seeds entangled on its feet and bill by the sticky surroundings, and then, flying away to another tree, it gets rid of them in turn by rubbing them off sideways in a fork of the > branches. That happens to be the precise spot that best suits the young mistletoe as a place for sprouting in. If it fell on to the ground beneath, it would be unable to maintain itself without the aid of a host."

WE

'Any one who has been a member of a committee of any kind, who has been present at an election, or who has served on a jury must have observed this curious fact. In France, where we talk much of liberty and equality, the majority of men desire not liberty, but servitude.

"Workingmen have thought that they would gain liberty by associating themselves, but they have begun to find that their unions, which, it would seem, ought to free them from capitalistic tyranny, can, in their turn, be the instruments of a nameless tyranny, one of the most cruel, a tyranny of workingmen over workingmen.

However this may be, the action of groups, directed, it is true, by a chief, but acting nevertheless as groups, is becoming more and more powerful in modern society. The fact is evident in divers lands, whatever may be the governmental form that deludes those who deal only in words. By parliamentary assemblies, through the action of the press, which is a guide or reflection of the opinions of the majority, the multitude is taking an active part in the government, not only in its interior acts, but also in its relations with other powers, and exercises a guiding influence which must be reckoned with.

"The genesis of currents of opinion, of which the consequences may be considerable, is a curious study. M. Le Bon has made some interesting researches into it in a book where he has studied what he calls the 'psychology of crowds.'

"What is a crowd, psychologically speaking? Here is a great number of persons who are crossing the Place de la Bastille one morning. They are workingmen, employees returning to workshop or office, women of similar occupation-all together they form a crowd, if you will, but more exactly a multitude. Suppose that we are in a period of political excitement, like that during the Boulangist episode. If General Boulanger crosses the square he will be cheered, they will follow him, there will be demonstrations in which men usually indifferent to politics will take part, who, by the contagion of example and by the fact that they happen to be present, will have been the subject of a special form of suggestion. Some months later, the same general in the same position will be hooted by the same multitude. But in the two cases, a common thought, animating men who find themselves together in the same place by chance, will have made of this multitude a psychological 'crowd,' having a special mental state.

"This crowd, thus made up, which we may call the 'active' crowd, is able, under the influence of skilful and daring manipulators, to do great things, for instance-alas! to commit frightful crimes; it is credulous, suggestionable, and in a great measure irresponsible.

"It may be a wise or a foolish man-in any case it is a daring and curious man-who takes the lead of the movement; but those who are not leaders, whether wise or foolish, become equal in the mass and are subject to the same impulses and errors.

"This crowd of the streets, whose leaders are never so near the Tarpeian rock as when they are carried by it to the Capitol; this crowd, mobile, impulsive, generous or cruel, but always extreme, which appears so often in troublous times, is not the only grouping that deserves the name of crowd.

An academy, a parliamentary assembly, a jury in a criminal court, are also psychological crowds, undergoing, in their deliber

ations and their acts, the influence of manipulators and of currents of opinion much more than of reasoning.

"The thing has been specially studied in the case of juries. Whatever their composition, whether they are formed of petty shopkeepers, of peasants, or of very cultivated men, their intellectual value is not very high if it is to be estimated by their verdicts.

"Here is how a former president of the Court of Assizes, M. Bérard des Glajeaux, expresses himself on this subject in his 'Memoirs :'

"To-day the choice of juries is really in the hands of the municipal counselors, who admit or throw out jurymen at pleasure, according to their political or electoral prejudices.

The

majority of those selected consist of merchants of less importance than those formerly chosen, and of employees in certain administrative departments. . All opinions mingling together with all professions in the rôle of juryman, many having the ardor of neophytes, and men of the best intentions finding themselves in the most humble situations, the spirit of the jury, nevertheless, has not changed; its verdicts have remained the same.' "One of the most illustrious lawyers of the Court of Assizes, Lachand, made use systematically of his right of challenge regarding all intelligent persons that he found in the jury. Now experience has taught us the entire uselessness of these challenges. The proof is that to-day the public ministry and the lawyers-in Paris at any rate-have given them up entirely, and as M. des Glajeaux remarks, the verdicts have not changed. 'They are neither better nor worse.'

"And, in fact, it is by sentiment and not by reasoning that the men of an assembly make a decision. The criminal lawyer must please the jury; he must devote himself to winning over those who, at the outset of the trial, it seemed should have taken the rôle of leaders.

"That member of a crowd who has been pleased has been nearly convinced, and is quite disposed to find satisfactory whatever reasons may be offered to him.

"One point more. A lawyer of our acquaintance once defended

in court a man accused of the theft of some title-deeds. His client demanded that he should challenge every landowner on the jury. He did not wish to have for judges persons too much attached to the ownership of land and too desirous of punishing those who give trouble to its legitimate possessors.

"In fact, whatever may be the mobility and the malleability of crowds, it will not do to run too directly against their prejudices and convictions.

"From this point of view every group of men, according to race, education, and professional habits, has a special mentality that necessarily limits the action of its leaders; it is dangerous for a thief to be judged by a property-owner. In general, crimes against property, crimes to which every one believes himself more or less exposed, are more severely punished by juries than other crimes whose effects seem unlikely ever to reach them.

"It is the common source of ideas of a people all of whose children have received a similar education, have been rocked to sleep with the same legends, and have been taught the same religion, that gives to this people a common ideal, and this constitutes patriotic unity. So, we may note in passing, we see that, in the history of peoples, religion has been the great element of union in a country, and has given to each people its special character, despite all else.

"It is a great power for France that she is a Christian land, and the day when revolutionists succeed in destroying her beliefs, they will have taken from the country a great element of preponderance and progress."- Translated for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

"THE Martin furnace, at the Lauchhammer Works, near Riesa, has to be charged eight times daily with about 13 tons of iron," says The Railway Review. "This has hitherto been done by hand at a great expense of time and money, but with the new feeding-apparatus one man can do in the tenth of the time the work of four men who have hitherto been necessary, and is not subjected to anything like the same temperature. The old iron is now loaded in the yard into iron troughs, three or four of which rest on a small truck, which is hauled by an electric motor in front of the furnace. On a second parallel line is the feeding-machine proper, a good-sized truck, on which there are a large electromotor and three small ones. wagon runs rapidly to one of the troughs; a long gripper swings out, catches it, lifts it from the truck, runs with it to the door of the furnace, thrusts it in, causes it to drop its contents, rapidly withdraws it, and lays it empty back in its place."

The feed

PREPARATION OF MILK FOR CONSUMPTION.

N

UMEROUS cases of epidemics from infected milk, together with a realization of the impossibility of a sufficiently rigid inspection of all dairies with their surroundings, have led to an increasing wish to employ processes for killing any diseasegerms that may be in the milk without injuring the taste or other qualities of the milk itself. A brief review of these processes. together with a description of a new method of applying the best of them-that of pasteurization-is translated below from an article by L. L'Hôte (La Nature, November 23):

"Milk is considered by physiologists as the perfect food, par excellence. It contains, in fact, all the substances necessary to the development of the organism-water, nitrogenous matter (casein and albumin), a sugary substance easily fermentible (lactin), fatty principles (butter), and finally mineral salts (alkaline and earthy phosphates, alkaline chlorids, etc.).

"We know that milk, a very unstable product, constitutes an excellent breeding-place for the development of micro-organisms, so physicians and hygienists have rightly occupied themselves with its preservation. To this end the dairy industry has made use of chemical agents, cold, sterilization, and pasteurization. "The addition to milk of chemical compounds (bicarbonate of soda, borax, salicylic acid, benzoate of soda, etc.) is forbidden.

These more or less active substances are really drugs. Milk is a product that ought to be delivered to the consumer in the state in which nature furnishes it.

"The employment of cold has not given good results. By congelation the mass loses some of its homogeneousness; the cream separates, and there remains an unfrozen central portion in the block.

"By heating the milk it is sterilized or pasteurized according to the temperature to which it is raised.

"If the milk be heated to 105° C. all the microbes are destroyed, and the milk, from a living product, is changed into a dead one. At this temperature the milk is modified in composition; there is dehydration of the sugar and alteration of the albuminoids. It assumes a dark color and acquires a cooked taste. On the surface of sterilized milk may be seen clots of butter, which appear in oily drops if the milk is heated to 37°. In a word, sterilized milk is decomposed milk.

"Pasteurization consists in heating the milk to about 75° C. [103° F.], a temperature sufficient to destroy the disease germs (the bacilli of tuberculosis, scarlatina, etc.). Pasteurized milk still contains some microbes, but not injurious ones; it is yet living.

"On au industrial scale, milk is usually pasteurized by passing it through heated coils of pipe. It is then cooled and bottled in the presence of air, which can not but be detrimental to its purity and its preservation.

"M. Contant, an engineer, has invented an apparatus, which he calls Le Tutelaire, and which admits of applying the process of pasteurization in a closed vessel. The milk, contained in open bottles, of a special kind of glass, is brought rapidly to the temperature of 80° C. by the aid of steam and then cooled down suddenly, after the bottles have been sealed. The sealing is of such

IT

T is commonly taken for granted that any one can accurately describe an event that he has witnessed or an object that he has seen, and that if a witness is honest and willing, his testimony is probably exact. But those familiar with courts of law know that dishonesty is the least frequent of the causes of inaccuracy. It is very rarely that the best witness is able to state with scientific exactness what he has seen, and his errors may involve vital points, while he is perfectly honest and willing to tell the truth. In fact, accurate observation and the power of verbal description are both results of long training, and very few persons receive this training. In Science (December 6) Próf. J. McKeen Cattell describes some experiments on the powers of observation and description in a class of college students. The results may be characterized as interesting, amusing, or disheartening, according to the point of view.

The experiments described were made on a class of 56 students in Columbia College in March, 1893. Several simple questions were first asked, and in each case the student was allowed one half minute to consider and write the answer. The first was: What was the weather a week ago to-day?" Says Professor Cattell:

"The answers were pretty equally distributed over all kinds of weather which are possible at the beginning of March. Of the 56 answers, 16 may be classed as 'clear,' 12 'rain,' 7 'snow,' 9 'stormy,' 6 'cloudy,' and 6 'partly stormy and partly clear.' It seems that an average man with a moderate time for reflection can not state much better what the weather was a week ago than what it will be a week hence. Yet this is a question that might naturally be asked in a court of justice. An unscrupulous attorney can discredit the statements of a truthful witness by cunningly selected questions. The jury, or at least the judge, should know how far errors in recollection are normal and how they vary under different conditions.

"We ought not, indeed, to conclude from these conflicting answers that no inference as to the weather on those days can be drawn. Almost nothing could be inferred from any single answer, but the answers taken together give information of a degree of exactness which may be defined. We can, however, better consider this matter in connection with questions requiring a quantitative answer.

"Three questions were asked with a view to learning the ordinary accuracy of observation: 'Do chestnut-trees or oak-trees lose their leaves the earlier in the autumn?' 'Do horses in the field stand with head or tail to the wind?' 'In what direction do the seeds of an apple point?' The questions were all answered correctly more often than incorrectly, but only by a moderate majority. Thus 30 students thought that chestnut-trees lose their leaves the earlier in the autumn, and 21 were of the opposite opinion; 34 students thought that horses in the field stand with tails to the wind, and 19 thought they stand facing it. Thus in only about three cases out of five will a college student answer such a question correctly."

After describing several other kinds of questions on various kinds of topics, the answers to which were about equally distributed between right and wrong, Professor Cattell goes on:

"Three questions were asked intended to determine the average These were accuracy in estimating weight, distance, and time. the weight of the text-book . . . used by the class, the distance between two buildings on the college grounds, and the time usu

"It appears that in these cases there was a marked tendency to underestimate weight and to overestimate time. Length was overestimated, but to a less degree. For the magnitudes used the average variation was about one third of the weight and one half of the distance or time. The actual errors were larger in the case of weight and time, but not in the case of distance. The middle estimate or median value is in all cases smaller than the average. The degree of confidence of the observer does not in these cases seem to measure objective accuracy.”

In all these cases Professor Cattell gives tables and diagrams showing the distribution of error and giving a means of predicting its occurrence in future statements of the same character. The final and most elaborate experiment was an attempt to draw a ground plan of the hall through which each member of the class had passed hundreds of times in going to and from recitation, the results showing that a large proportion of the members had no clear idea of its size and shape. In summing up all these results and commenting upon them, Professor Cattell dwells upon the usefulness of such experiments in ascertaining the defects of children and the education most needed by each individual. Some method of the same kind, he thinks, should be devised to test the fitness of candidates for the civil service, and the accuracy of witnesses in courts of justice. The replies of the witnesses, the writer observes, could be collected and given to experts, who could affirm therefrom what the chances were that the defendant had committed homicide and what the chances were that he had premeditated the deed.

THE

DRINK AND DRUGS.

HE drink demon is dying, if we are to believe The Hospital, which makes this assertion in an editorial article; but we are not, it seems, to rejoice, for a subtler and perhaps more dangerous foe is creeping in to replace him, namely, the indulgence in opium and similar drugs. Drunkenness is the vice of the savage; the abuse of narcotics is that of the civilized man, the student, the philosopher. This is certainly a striking generalization. Leaving to others the discussion regarding its truth or falsity, we quote from The Hospital's article a few of its most interesting paragraphs. After mentioning the recent investigation of the opium habit in India, which showed that it may be regarded as the Oriental correlative of our alcohol habit, being neither more nor less injurious to the national health, on the whole, it goes on to say:

"Stimulants are the natural indulgence of the strong and stolid, narcotics of the weak and sensitive. The Viking, giver and receiver of hard blows, thick-skinned in body and mind, fired his imagination with mead and saw the violent glories of Valhalla. The Hindu sage, weak with fasting, steadied his shaking nerves with opium, and then, in 'dreams that wave before the half-shut eye' beheld Nirvana, the heavenly nothingness. The dullard required something to rouse his imagination, the oversensitive dreamer something to soothe his nerves, and thus drunkenness is a vice of savagery, drugging a vice of civilization.

“With our civilization has come a great and continual decrease in drunkenness. The 'national drink bill,' concerning which so much is said, is less, man for man, than it was a century or a half a century ago, or at least represents a less consumption. We hear more about drunkenness, but that is because we have ceased to regard it as a matter of course, a regular part of daily life. Therefore, it may be surmised that our blue-ribbon and other armies in fighting the 'drink-fiend' are striking at what is, after all, a dying monster, tho dangerous even in the death-grips. Meanwhile another and subtler demon arises. The vices of civilization are with us, and those who would scorn to 'drink,' as they call it-differentiating the consumption of alcohol from that of all other liquids-indulge in drugs of various kinds. Opium, either in the form of laudanum-drinking or in the subtler form of the hypodermic injection of morphine, is, tho not common, less

"

The peculiar danger in this kind of drunkenness lies in the fact that its victims do not know that they are drunkards, at least till such knowledge comes too late. To such temptations women are especially subject, and they often succumb, while they wonder at the symptoms-depression, irritability, moodiness-that are precisely those of a form of inebriety. After a statement of these facts the article concludes as follows:

"The general habit of drugging is to be condemned. No healthy person needs continual medicating with either digestives, purgatives, tonics, or sedatives. If a doctor prescribes these things, good and well; he knows, presumably, when to give and when to stop, but the irresponsible way in which people pour substances far stronger than alcohol into their systems would awaken one's admiration for their courage, if it did not arouse one's indignation at their folly. Cases have been known of ginger drunkenness. Extracts of ginger, popular among women as relieving functional disturbances, contain strong alcohol disguised by the pungent spice. Arsenic-eating is not confined to Styria, but is popular as an improvement to the complexion among the society dames of Australia, while innocent people take strychnine in their tonics, without knowing it, until they begin to feel 'jumpy.' The danger is twofold-first, the directly injurious effects of the chosen drug, and secondly the risk of ignorantly clasping to one's breast a viper more malignant than the 'drink fiend.' Alcohol we know and dread, but these things-as dangerous as alcohol-we take without any fear. And while for men and women of a different race, dwelling in a hot and malarious climate, quinin, opium, and other drugs may be not only harmless but even wholesome, they are for us Anglo-Saxons, except in rare instances, subtle and pernicious foes."

THE TUBERCLE BACILLUS AS A FRIEND OF MAN.

WE

E know that a large proportion of the various forms of microbic life are not only not injurious to health, but positively beneficial, and in some cases almost indispensable to the maintenance of a normal condition; but we should hardly place the bacillus of tuberculosis among the number. In The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette (November) Lawrence Irwell tries to show us that this dreaded scourge is a benefactor of the but we are not much reassured when we find that its benefactions consist in the killing-off of a large portion of the race for the benefit of those that remain. Mr. Irwell's argument may be understood from the following brief abstract printed in The Medical News (Philadelphia, December 7) :

human race,

"Mr. Lawrence Irwell endeavors to show that the tubercle bacillus is a benefactor of the human race, and that its extermination would have a detrimental effect upon the world at large. He contends that the larger portion of the community is made up of the 'unfit,' from an evolutionary standpoint, who marry and procreate from sexual rather than natural selection, and that this class includes those of a tuberculous diathesis. Such individuals are exceedingly prolific; but to counteract the baneful result of this state of affairs the tubercle bacillus rapidly destroys the mother and her offspring. The remedy proposed is the education of the people in order to prevent marriage among those 'unfit' from any cause."

In commenting upon this statement, The Medical News speaks editorially as follows:

"While there is a modicum of truth in these several propositions, there is enough of fallacy to lead to incorrect conclusions. In the first place, we can not admit that infection with or escape

from tuberculosis (or other infectious disease, for all infections are alike in requiring a certain susceptibility upon the part of the individual) may be made the criterion of 'fitness' or 'unfitness.' Tuberculosis is a disease from which recovery is not only possible but even common; while exemption may be overcome by exposure to given conditions. The tubercle bacillus only develops where the soil has been brought to a certain grade of cultivation and fails to secure lodgment under opposite circumstances. Further, the offspring of tuberculous parents are not necessarily 'unfit.' Suitably surrounded they may reach a state of vigorous growth and robust health.

We fear that a logical application of the principles advocated by Mr. Irwell would lead to a test-exposure of all individuals to infection with the tubercle bacillus (and other pathogenic microorganisms), and any that escaped would fall into the class of the 'fit.' We can agree to a voluntary restriction of marriage among those that manifest morbid physical or mental tendencies, and cordially indorse the proposal to disseminate this view as an educational measure.

"While directing efforts to increasing the resistance of the individual to the invasion of disease, we must not neglect as far as lies in our power to limit the dissemination and diminish the virulence of its active causes."

The Ethical Question Involved in Vivisection."The true ethical question that is involved in vivisection," says The Medical News, November 30, in an editorial commenting on recent discussions of the subject, "has been stated so often that it can gain nothing from being stated again, and yet in this connection it can never be stated too frequently. We observe, by the way, a rather uniform reticence on this question by those who oppose vivisection. They either ignore it as beneath them or they studiously avoid it as too far above them, we know not which. This question, in brief, is that of the right of mankind, who claim and constantly exercise the right to chase, trap, catch, maim, and slaughter all forms of animal life for sport, for food, for clothing, or for avoiding nuisances; also to use animal life for the demonstration of scientific truths. We are content here, without discussion, to state merely our belief that the one right is inseparable from the other.

"Of the immense importance, nay absolute necessity, of vivisection for the progress of medical science there can be no question. Obstructionists, who, like Dr. Leffingwell, minimize the results obtained, as in the treatment of tetanus, present a mental attitude which is simply fatal to all progress. Such obstructionists have stood to oppose every inch of progress, not only in the scientific but in the political and religious world. For them one objection is magnified so as to obstruct their mental horizon in all directions. They are mentally and morally myopic."

Curious Properties of Viper's Blood.-Messrs. Phisalix and Bertrand, who have been studying the properties of viper's blood for some time, and who have discovered, as already reported in these columns, that it contains the same poisonous substance as the venom of the same reptile, gave an account of additional investigations before the Paris Academy of Sciences on November 18. They had supposed that the viper, which resists inoculations of its own venom, did so because it was accustomed to this poison. But they now find in the blood, besides the poisonous substance, another substance that neutralizes the effect of the former. These two substances are destroyed by heat at different temperatures. The toxic substance disappears if the blood be kept at a temperature of 588 C. during a quarter of an hour, while the antitoxic substance remains. If the blood thus heated be injected into a guinea-pig, not only does the animal not die, but it can endure an inoculation of fresh viper's blood."-Translated and Condensed for THE LITERARY DIGEST.