and Ivanoff's fame was settled when the highly gifted, but fantastic N. F. Chomjäkoff, the father of Slavophilism, wrote in the Russkaja Besseda, that "Ivanoff is a great soul, born from the depths of the Russian people's spirit, and full of a powerful religious consciousness. He is a great artist, who in this apostate age has created a true art and has reembodied the Christian ideals and dogmas, and thereby laid the foundation of Russian painting and a new world-art."

In 1858 Ivanoff returned to St. Petersburg and was fêted everywhere. But he was very unhappy. Modern society stood in too great contrast to his ideas and mode of life. He was presented to the Emperor, who complimented him upon his work. The Czarina promised to buy his painting for 10,000 rubles and give him a yearly stipend of 2,000 rubles. Before the sale, Ivanoff died of cholera nostras, July 3, 1858. His painting was finally bought by the State for 15,000 rubles and sent to a museum in Moscow.

THERE

THREE CENTURIES OF OXFORD.

Macmillan's Magazine, London, October.

HERE are some who remember Oxford best for the sake of its amusements and its social life, others as the scene of academic triumphs, and the patron of studies in which they still find their chief solace; while others again are more affected by the memory of that great religious movement of which Oxford was so long the centre, and of which the echoes have not yet died away. All alike, however, look back upon Oxford with a kind and a degree of interest inspired by no other spot and no other institution in the world. Reminiscences of Oxford can never pall upon them; book after book and essay after essay may continue to be written on the subject through the coming years without the authors ever having to complain of a dearth of readers or a decline of sympathy.

The volume just published by the Oxford Historical Society, should therefore command a wide attention. It begins with reminiscenses of Sir Thomas Bodley, who matriculated in 1559, and ends with those of the present Lord Brabourne, who took his degree in 1851. It does not profess to present us with any original matter, the book being merely a collection of passages selected from the writings of Oxford men relating to their university careers; but, as bringing together within a small compass the experience of so large a number of competent witnesses differing so widely from each other in opinions, characters, and tastes, and covering the whole period of from the end of the Reformation in the 16th Century to the beginning of the great change, which has so materially affected the University of Oxford in the 19th, the book has a value of its own quite apart from the elements of interest to which we have already referred.

When Oxford was at the height of her reputation as a mediæval university, nobody dreamed of going there except for purposes of study. Students of all ages and countries flocked of their own accord to her famous lecture-rooms, inspired by literary curiosity, and not sent there for the sake of education and discipline. Such, we mean, was the general character of the place, and it is one which many have been anxious to revive. They have not liked to see in Oxford only a kind of upper public-school. But the changes they regret were brought about by causes which it would have been very difficult to counteract. It is necessary only to name the invention of printing, which, by reducing the value of oral teaching, naturally diminished the number of students who came to Oxford from abroad, or from the remote parts of Great Britain to listen to the famous teachers. But it seems to us that the transformation of Oxford University from its mediæval to its modern form was only one part of the great social, religious, and political revolution which began with the Tudors. In the

first place, with the cessation of the Wars of the Roses, and the diminution of the baronial households, a change gradually took place in the education of the English aristocracy. For a long time the old idea survived that the profession of arms was the only one becoming a gentleman who did not care to be a priest. But though the idea survived, the practice founded on it naturally began to die out when war ceased to be the almost constant occupation of the governing classes. A classical education instead of a military education now became the hall-mark of a gentleman.

The Reformation divided Oxford into religious parties. The Civil War made her a political partisan. Two new interests were thus created; two new passions were kindled within the University, which it would be only natural to conclude must have interfered with that exclusive devotion to learning which had prevailed during her earlier days. When Oxford became a centre of political and religious agitation, literature had only half her love.

But it is a mistake to suppose that their laxity was what many people suppose it to have been who found their ideas upon the reports of Gibbon and Lord Eldon. One of the most interesting chapters in the volume is the vindication of Magdalen College from the aspersions cast on it by Gibbon. That Oxford was not the castle of indolence which those who know it only from the imperfect and prejudiced reports of one great man, and the obiter dictum of another, have been tempted to believe, is, we think, pretty certain.

What must have made a great difference in the life of Oxford in the last century was the number of men wlio continued to reside there after they had taken their degrees, constituting a kind of society wholly unknown in later times. Down to the middle of the present century, indeed, and still later, the oldfashioned Fellow, whose college was his home, and who spent his life within its walls, was not unknown. But a hundred and fifty years ago, men of much the same stamp were to be found among the resident Masters and Bachelors who were not Fellows. These, if they did not stay at Oxford all their lives, stayed often for a good many years, and helped to give a character to the University, somewhat different from what we are accustomed to ourselves. Now Oxford is one gigantic school, composed entirely of pupils and teachers.

THE WORTH OF A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. ANDREW P. PEABODY, OF THE CLASS OF 1826, HARVARD COLLEGE.

The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Boston, October to
December.

HE division of labor, essential to industrial thrift and pros

the manhood of the operator. As Adam Smith says, the man who makes the tenth part of a pin is much less of a man than he who makes the whole pin. For good or evil, this system is now carried, and will be more thoroughly carried, into the liberal professions and into most of the departments of life that require generous culture and well-trained art or skill. Specialization is or will be the prevailing rule and habit wherever it is practicable. If I want a lawyer to look up a title, to make my will, to take care of a trust-fund, or to prosecute a trespasser, I shall not go, as I should formerly have gone, to the same man, but to a different man for each of these purposes. My family physician no longer has charge, as he would have had fifty years ago, of my teeth, my eyes, my ears, or even of my lungs, if they are seriously diseased. An ever larger proportion of the foremost men in every calling are becoming specialists, and it is the professions in which this is impossible that are least progressive.

To this trend of the world's life, the university must conform or else fall behind the age, Young men will no longer tread a

curriculum beaten by every foot; but in the vast range of possible studies they will prefer those which look most directly to their destined positions or vocations. The elective system has thus become a necessity.

Specialization has its perils, no less for the lawyer and the scientific man than for the pinmaker. The mere specialist dwindles as a man, even though he become more skilled in insight or in handicraft. Still more, even in his own department, if he improves as a manipulator he degenerates as a knower and a thinker.

Now, a young man who begins very early his professional or technical training is confined to a single class of subjects, and to the society of those whose limitations are like his own; and the more thoroughly he does his required work from day to day, the less does he see, and learn, and know beyond it.

The university student is, or ought to be, independent of these narrowing influences. In the first place, his preparatory course lays for him a foundation of such knowledge as he needs in each and all of the higher walks of life—a foundation perhaps not so deep as in earlier time, but-what is of far greater importance-very much broader, and destined before long virtually to include what used to be the studies of the Freshman year. In the next place, the faithful student, while chiefly occupied with but few of the large range of electives open to him, in part purposely, in still greater part unconsciously, becomes more or less conversant with many other topics within that range, through intercourse with fellow-students, by university lectures which often draw large audiences, and from the atmosphere of the place, which is laden which the blended aroma of divers and unlike cultures, and with which he breathes in knowledge without knowing whence or how. Such acquisitions are indeed "a little learning," which, however, is not a "dangerous thing," but eminently desirable when one is aware that it is little, hopes to make it more, and has eye, ear, and mind open to the opportunities of increasing it.

Then, too, the methods of the university teach a student how and where to look for the information that he needs, which is often of immeasurably more importance than a large yet circumscribed amount of exact knowledge which cannot be increased at will.

A university man has the added advantage of adequate means for a due self-estimate. He can know, if he will, his comparative standing with those of his own profession, and well-educated men in general. One who gains superior culture in less direct ways is liable, on the one hand, to undue self-conceit and self-glorification, and, on the other hand, fully as often, to an injuriously low appreciation of his own attainments, merits, and claims.

The chief objection to university education is that it brings men too late into active life. The true way of meeting this objection is to shorten the period of the preparatory course. School-life is more thon half wasted. Vacations and holidays take up a full third of it, while not play, but the serious business that is made of play, usurps a large proportion of the remaining two-thirds. Fifty years ago, when three years, often shortened to two, sufficed to fit a boy for college, the amount of close, hard study-whether to the best purpose or not-was very much greater than is now spread over six years. There was enough of play then, too; but it was play, not work; mere recreation, not an organized system of interschool contests, involving in its management fully as much of thought and labor as is required in the schoolroom. Breaking down from overwork was then seldom heard of,-very much less frequent than severe, sometimes lifelong, and even fatal, injury from baseball or football. Not only the interests of the university, but the permanent well-being and well-doing of those who are to perform for society its most arduous and precious work, demand that the acquisition of knowledge, and still more of scholarly habits, become again, as it has almost ceased to be, the foremost occupation of the school-boy.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.

THE NITROGEN OF THE AIR AND PLANTS. CH. ER. GUIGNET.

Le Magazin Pittoresque, Paris, Oetober 15.

I.

HE life of man is intimately connected with the life of

Tplants. Our food consists of plants, directly, under the

form of grains or fleshy fruits, of leaves, or of roots; indirectly, when we employ vegetables to nourish the animals which we use for food.

Unless we live like the Esquimaux on fish, seal oil, and whale oil, it is not apparent how we could get along without vegetables.

Without the sun there would be no vegetation. It may be said, then, that we are not only warmed,but nourished by the sun. That is why the worship of the sun represents the rational religion of primitive peoples, to employ the judicious expression of Mr. Berthelot, Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of SciUnder the influence of the sun. vegetation derives from the air a portion of its elements.

ences.

The air-which the ancients regarded as a simple or elementary body—is a mixture of two gases, A hundred quarts of air contain twenty-one quarts of oxygen, and seventy-nine quarts of nitrogen. The former promotes respiration and combustion; it quickly relights a match which has no mark of being afire save a red point. Nitrogen possesses quite different properties; at first sight it resembles air or oxygen, but it extinguishes a lighted match, and no animal which inhales it can live. Hence the name of azote, which it formerly bore in English, and still retains in French, derived from the Greek, and meaning something inimical to life.

It is necessary to remind my readers that the name gas (from the word geist, spirit) is given to every body which resembles air. All gases, however, can be reduced to a liquid, and even a solid state, if they are sufficiently cooled and compressed. This great discovery was made in 1877, by Mr. Cailletet, Member of the Institute; and, a little while after, through a different method, by Mr. Raoul Pietet.

Until recent years it was thought that nitrogen was an inert gas, which played no active part in vegetation; but facts established by long scientific researches prove the contrary.

More than thirty years ago Mr. George Ville, an eminent Professor of the Museum, the ardent apostle of chemical manures in France, demonstrated that the nitrogen of the air is directly absorbed by plants. He was warmly opposed, however, by the distinguished agriculturist, Boussingault, who brought over to his view the majority of savants and the best instructed agriculturists.

By a long series of experiments, made with perfect precision, Mr. Berthelot (whose name is an authority in the world of chemistry) has absolutely confirmed what Mr. Ville declared to be the result of his own labors. Several foreign chemists and agriculturists-Messrs. Hellriegel, Wilforth, and others— have reached the same conclusion.

To understand clearly the part played by atmospheric nitrogen in vegetation, it is necessary to understand what is meant by free nitrogen, ammoniacal nitrogen, nitric nitrogen, and organic nitrogen.

Free nitrogen is that of the air, which is simply mixed with oxygen. It has, over the other two kinds of nitrogen, the enormous advantage of costing nothing. This advantage, however, would amount to nothing, if the air were inert, which, happily for us, it is not.

Ammoniacal nitrogen is nitrogen combined with hydrogen, such as is found in ordinary ammonia. This ammonia is a base which is combined with acids: with sulphuric acid it yields sulphate of ammonia so much used as a manure and contain

ing twenty-one per cent. of ammoniacal nitrogen; with carbolic acid it gives carbonate of ammonia, and so on.

Nitric nitrogen is nitrogen combined with oxygen and not simply mingled with it, as in the air. The principal combination of nitrogen and oxygen is nitric acid. This acid is combined with bases and forms nitrates: as the nitrate of potash (known as nitre or saltpetre); nitrate of soda (known as saltpetre of Chili), which is imported in enormous quantities, and which is used in the manufacture of nitric acid and nitrates, for fertilizing land and the like.

When nitrogen is employed as a manure, it is nearly always under the form either of ammoniacal nitrogen or nitric nitrogen. Under both forms it bears about the same value in the manure market. If you buy for manure 100 kilogrammes of pure sulphate of ammonia, that represents 21 kilogrammes of ammoniacal nitrogen. In 100 kilogrammes of pure nitrate of soda there are 16 kilogrammes of nitrogen. From these figures, it is clear that, the price of both being equal, it is better to use the sulphate of ammonia for manure, since it is richer in nitrogen.

D

SERPENTS AND SPERM-WHALES.
STANISLAS MEUNIER.

La Nouvelle Revue, Paris, October 15. URING the last three months some of the gentlemen connected with the Museum of Natural History at Paris have given to the world interesting results of their observations. The learned Professor of Herpetology at the Museum, Léon Vaillant, describes the diet of a serpent, more than twenty feet long, which has been on exhibition at the Jardin des Plantes since the month of August, 1885. Up to the end of 1891, this reptile had eaten thirty-four times, that is, on an average, five times a year. The largest number of times in one year that the snake took food was in 1886, when he ate seven times. Nearly always the food consisted of male and female goats of small size or yonng. Three times, however, the repast was composed of rabbits, and once of a goose.

The feeding of the serpent, which will eat nothing but what is alive, offers an uncommon spectacle, and many persons request to have notice of the times when the creature feeds, so as to witness the feeding. Yet the lightning-like rapidity with which the reptile seizes its prey produces a painful impression.

A propos of the volume which can, by means of distention, enter the stomach of serpents, Professor Vaillant relates what follows:

A French viper was put in the same cage with a horned viper. As these individuals, although belonging to different species, were of the same size, the French viper having been perhaps a trifle the stronger, it was supposed that these reptiles would live amicably side by side. Nevertheless the horned viper, during the following night, swallowed his companion in captivity, and in order to accomodate this prey so disproportionate to itself, its body was distended to such a degree that the scales, instead of touching each other laterally and even overlapping each other a little, as in its normal condition, were separated, leaving between the longitudinal rows of them a space equal to their own breadth. All the same, digestion proceeded regularly and the viper did not appear to have suf

fered in the least.

Talking of digestion, it may be noticed that the bits of matter so much sought after by makers of perfumery under the name of ambergris, are, it is now agreed by scientific men, the residue of digestion or rather calculus formed in the extreme part of the intestines of sperm-whales. Professor George Pouchett has received for the Museum a very precious collection of this singular substance, of which he has made a thorough study. The result of his observations shows, that despite the sometimes considerable difference in the appearance of different specimens, they are always constituted alike. They result from the juxtaposition of very fine crystals, clearly revealed by polarized light, which enables us always to distinguish true amber from its numberless imitations.

IN

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM AND TRAINING.

JUSTUS GAUle.

Die Nation, Berlin, October.

N every one of us the mental and physical characteristics are in great measure conditioned by training. Along with mother-milk we have drunk in freely the milk of our stepmother, habit, and no one of us can say how much he owes to heredity, and how much to the influences of post-natal environment. We may be credited with originality and personal opinions, but we all "talk book " and are modeled on the same type, like Queen Mandanbane in the Triumph of Sensibility." Recent experiments in hypnotism have illustrated the facility with which, under favorable conditions, the views of one person may be authoritatively impressed upon another as his own. These conditions are actually realized in childhood, in the school. From our first entrance into the world, our opinions are moulded by the conditions of environment. These are sufficiently varied to tend to a measure of individuality, but passing through the mill of the school, we emerge alike in views

as in costume.

To determine how much of individuality survives the pro process would be interesting, but we are hardly yet in a position to undertake the investigation of the influence exercised by the mass upon the individual. There is, however a department of the subject in which we can pursue our investigations on safe grounds-the influence of special pursuits.

Go to a parade-ground where a squad of raw recruits, fresh drafted from the agricultural districts are being drilled for the army. Note how they carry themselves, note the dullness of their expression, the slowness and ungainliness of their movements, their inability to stop together at the command "Halt!” and then contrast them with a similar body of men who have been two years under drill. You will see that these latter have the eye brighter, the skin clearer, the motions more prompt, the bearing more erect, the step more assured, the play of features more lively, the fingers more supple, and other groups of muscles more developed. The awkward young clodhopper And the

man.

has been transformed into the brisk citizen-soldier. change is not merely in externals, there is a correspondingly increased activity of mind, a wider mental horizon, and a formation of new tastes. In appearance, and in fact, he is a new And so in every other pursuit, physical or mental, the necessary training induces types of men all modified in conformity with their pursuits. Even national types may be equally ascribed to influences of environment, the most powerful of which is, of course, the already established type. There must, nevertheless, be a limit to the moulding power of these influences. We can hardly ascribe to them the blonde hair, the blue eyes, and long heads so essentially characteristic of the Germanic race. There must be some constitutional factors in man, impervious to the influences of environment, The problem has been much discussed in recent times, but no satisfactory solution has been offered. My object in the present paper is to endeavor to contribute something to its solution.

The first perceptible change induced by practice in the gymnasium is enlargement of the muscles. The old fibres of which it was composed are enlarged and strengthened, and new ones are added to it. This in turn is due to the fact that

the blood from which they derive their nourishment flows into them in proportion to the activity of their function. The more blood is used up in building up the muscles, the keener is the appetite, the more energetic the performance of the function of digestion, and conversion of the nutritive matter into food, and the greater the capacity of the muscles for renewed activity. Again the more actively the muscles are exercised, the more freely are the waste products of combustion got rid of. But while every group of muscles in the body is capable of being thus developed by a systematic course of training which shall call them all into activity, the capacity of any one set of them to undergo exceptional development by exercise while

other sets receive merely sufficient nourishment to maintain them in statu quo, suggests at once immense possibilities of changes induced by habit, especially by those habits necessitated by the various pursuits of life by which the muscles employed are not merely enlarged and strengthened, but acquire a special aptitude which in time becomes almost automatic.

This development of physical capacities, due immediately to exercise, and the consequent inflow of an enhanced measure of nutriment, may be ascribed with a certain measure of justice to the nutritive food taken. But that alone does not satisfactorily account for development and enhanced capacity. The physiologist wants to know in what form the enhanced capacity presents itself. He wants to know what gives the muscle power to draw nutriment from the blood. In the process of muscular development there is an important change in the inter-relations of many of the complex organic molecules. The muscles become richer in these molecules by training. This is not due to the nutriment-not to the blood-but to that which sets the muscles in action-the nerves. The muscle has no innate capacity of originating its own development, its activities are dependent on, and conformed to, the activities of the motor nerves, the channels of transmission of nervous energy from the brain. The function of the nerves is not simply that of the electric wire or pneumatic tube. From facts partly familiar, partly recently discovered, I conclude confidently that the nerves are not mere instruments, but play an active part in the transmission of messages. And this activity, precisely as with the muscles, attracts a greater amount of nutrition, attended with a building up of the nerve-substance, and enhancement of nerve-capacity. The muscles cannot surpass in development the nerves which control them, the muscular conditions which favor growth being dependent on nervous action.

So, then, muscular development is traced to its source in nervous activity; and following this to its source we are guided to the entrances of the organism, the skin, and the organs of sense. Here at these entrances the forces of the outer world which environ us, knock and hammer unceasingly. We cannot emancipate nor withdraw ourselves from their influence. Ever they stand at the boundary line which severs them from the vital forces within us, which resist their intrusion. The resistance of this intrusion is the condition of our existence.

Of the existence of these external forces we know only by confronting them in strife. What we call a sense-impression, is really an impression, that is to say, it has really produced a change, however trifling, at the surface of the body. Our weapons, our soldiers in this strife are our nerves; it is they which maintain the necessary resistance, it is through their agency that we repair the impressions made by the outer world on our surface. The more vigorous the assault, the more energetic is the defense, and the greater the nervous capacity of resistance developed.

For this nervous capacity develops in the ratio of the task it is called on to perform, is in fact developed by the assaults upon the organism. Here, then, we have traced muscular development to its ultimate source in the forces of nature which environ us. Training leads to the evolution of types. adapted to their special environment, because it is the forces of environment themselves, which, step by step, produce the evolution.

If these views are correct, the organism will always be found adapted to the environment which has moulded it. One might go further, and assume that like conditions tend to produce uniformity of types. But one must tread cautiously here. The tendency would undoubtedly be to the unification of related types; but I have already hinted that there are factors which impose impassable, limitations to the moulding influences of environment; a subject to which, perhaps, I may on some future occasion return.

INEBRIETY IN ITS SEVERAL ASPECTS.
T. L. WRIGHT, M.D.

Quarterly Journal of Inebriety, Hartford, October.
IPSOMANIA is a disease of the mind, showing intermit-

tent periods of latency and activity—the patient, as. a rule, resuming, in the intervals of his attacks, his normal sobriety, regretting his excesses, and being filled with good resolutions and excellent intentions. During the reign of the dipsomaniacal access, however, the insane desire is to achieve intoxication. Nothing can overcome or dissuade. "Theft prostitution even, will not stand in the way of one in the insane pursuit of drink. It is in cases such as this that the father takes the last piece of property to the dramshop, or else it is the mother who, forgetful of her honor, throws aside all shame and makes a harlot of herself for a few glasses of brandy."

It is customary to impute guilt to any one who voluntarily gives the rein to his passions and appetites, knowing the recompense to be the loss of honor and the neglect of duty. But in the case of the dipsomaniac, it may be presumed, that as long as the disease is in the ascendant, the moral sensibilities are obscured or dormant; and in that condition the proclivity for drink will be unchecked, either by the operations of reason or by scruples of conscience. If dipsomania is true insanity, it must as such be expected to display insane motives. These of course interfere in a very radical manner with rational volition. In truth, they usurp the throne and functions of reason. The thorough dipsomaniac does not "voluntarily" give way to the gratification of his passions and appetites. He is overtaken with a morbid impulse of such intensity and force, that it is impossible to array against it the subdued mental capacities that characterize the predominancy of the insane state. Dipsomania must be viewed as a constitutional malady. It may be hereditary or it may be acquired. The latter contingency is an exhibition of the influence of physical injuries, or of chronic diseases when reflected upon the brain. Dipsomania is, therefore, a disease very difficult to cure; yet it is amenable to the biological evolutions of the living body; and it may, not infrequently, become totally eliminated from the constitution, and the patient spontaneously recover.

The length of the intervals between the attacks of dipsomaniac vary in different persons, and even in the same person. It may be a few days or weeks, or even months. The tendency is, however, for the attacks to come on more and more frequently. The disease feeds upon itself; and as drinking weakens and distresses the nervous system, the calls for alcohol become more urgent and at shorter intervels.

"

The dipsomaniacal onset is not without premonitory symptoms. The patient becomes melancholy, depressed, silent, isolated. Uneasiness and fretfulness appear. 'He has no friends," and he sinks deeper and deeper into despondency. His appetite fails, while morbid sensations oppress and disturb the physical organism-the whole being finally merged and swallowed up in an insatiable craving for alcoholic drinks. Sometimes by chance, and again perhaps with a purpose, the alcoholic cup finds its way to the lips of a man of unstable and quivering nerve. Instantly the galling invitations of the system are allayed. Forebodings cease to disquiet, and a delightful feeling of repose and self-reliance tranquillizes the body and comforts the mind. Pleasing thoughts, grand ideas, glowing fancies, fantastic imaginings, witty, absurd, grotesque, brilliant, pass through the mind in endless profusion. It is not strange, when alcohol produces such effects as these upon a mind naturally given to trouble and unrest, that a resort should be had to its alluring but deceptive influences. The motives of the spasmodic drinker in taking alcohol, are never the subjects of calm deliberation, and of choice wholly free.

There is this peculiarity about the drinking of the impulsive inebriate: that his potations are only limited by the bounds of physical endurance. It is not so much an appetite for alcohol,

as it is an indication of a great and consuming nerve distress importunate for relief.

The dipsomaniac is infatuated with the agreeable experience of recent intoxication, and in his wild efforts to obtain the full fruition of the alcoholic influence, he becomes speedily and profoundly inebriated. He drinks himself into insensibility, only to awaken and again drink himself into insensibility; and this proceeding he repeats for days together, and until the utter disorganization of the powers of the stomach compel him to desist. It is needless to say that both the immediate and remote effects of alcohol fail not to declare themselves in the dipsomaniac with peculiar distinctness. We have here in due course of time the deleterious influences of alcohol upon a system blasted and degenerated, with nerves, and glands, and brain structurally ruined and useless in every truly physiological sense.

When the dipsomaniacal diathesis is not of extreme force, there is no doubt that by a special effort of the will the patient may be enabled to abstain from alcoholic drinks, but he must resolve on total abstinence. After the first glass the motive for abstinence no longer exists. There is for such persons no middle-ground, no compromise. The outcome is victory complete, resplendent, or it is utter defeat.

THE SEAT OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUAL DISEASES. WILLIAM STRUTHERS.

T°

་

Medico-Legal Journal, Vol. X., No. 1.

10 hear a person in ordinary conversation talk about his or her memories," would, no doubt, strike the majority of people as an eccentricity of expression. The existence of separate and distinct memories within the human brain, has, however, recently been definitely established.

Ralph Waldo Emerson afforded a good example of the local limitation of aphasia. During the last years of his life, with scarcely any indications of mental decline, he experienced great difficulty in making himself understood by words. More than a score of experiments bore witness to the reality of the local habitation of language and its maladies, without convincing the scientific world; and the patient investigator of the subject, Brocca, encountered the usual mistrust and opposition.

Very interesting are the corroborating illustrations educed by him and by others, and he received positive assurance of the trustworthiness of his discovery from the fact that any injury done to the little gray patch of cerebral substance on the left side of the brain in the third frontal convolution of the cerebrum near the Sylvian fissure, occasioned disturbances of speech, whereas nothing similar occurred when the right side was tampered with.

As not infrequently happens, the solution of one problem cast a ray of light upon other obscure questions, and led, in this case, to an acquaintance with the existence of various memories.

There is a lingual visual memory, an auditory memory of the same kind, and what may be termed a nervo-motor memory, whose character is well illustrated by the case of a person who, showing perplexity in the recognition of words by sight and by sound, discovers that by writing them he recovers their lost signification. Visual memory of words when impaired has not infelicitously been called mental blindness and may coexist with auditory and nervo-motor sanity.

Of the various memories, that of the ear appears to be ordi narily most active. In fact there are many persons who never represent words to themselves except by the spoken sound thereof, and consequently if any injury occurs to their auditory mnemonic centre, they are particularly embarrassed in the expression of thought. Less frequently we find people with the keenest mental vision of words, with little power of auditory remembrance.

Then, again, we find people in whom none of the mnemonic

centres are affected, but nierely disabled through lack of conductive media, when, as sometimes happens, not the gray matter, but only the white afferent fibres of the mental apparatus have suffered hurt. Such folk sink into a veritable" slough of despond" in the use of words, misapplying terms, and miscalling and confusing generally everybody and everything to the utter discomfort of themselves and their friends. This condition has been called paraphasia, and aptly so, for it certainly · appears to be an all-around racket.

If all the mnemonic centres are deserted, the patient's case is desperate, but the paralysis of a single memory may be compensated by a careful and constant exercise of another; a man used to recalling words by sounds only might, for example, on being deprived of that faculty, so wisely discipline the visual memory as to regain command of intelligent utterance, and eventually, even of his lost auditory memory, perhaps through the reaction of the one centre upon the other.

To the terms aphasia, mental blindness, and paraphasia we should add amnesia, a comprehensive designation of memory-failure; mental surdity, or deafness, loss of the auditory memory, and agraphia or agraphy, the inability to exercise the nervo-motor memory, causing the patient to forget how to write while recollecting words in other connections. It is curious to remark that, according to Lombroso, all known races of men are right-handed, as are all classes, except the criminal; and as the mnemonic nerves decussate or cross one another, on their passage from the cerebrum to the surface, the presence of the seat of language on the left side of the brain is but another indication of the natural selection that rendered hereditary, for the most, the preference of the right side over the left in the matter of manual usage.

What complexity is the outcome of prying into that mysterious Mnemosyne, once regarded as one and indivisible.

TOUCH AND TASTE IN ANIMALS,
Chambers's Journal, London, October.

́O one doubts that animals have sense, but most of us know Is sight a universal gift? Do animals recognize each other, and, if so, how? Can all creatures, even those low in the scale of creation, hear and taste and smell? What is the meaning of the variety of sounds, with all their curious inflections, often so unpleasant to our ears, that are made by animals? These, and many simlar questions, can now be at least partially answered; for both American and English naturalists have been lately working at this subject. Although, as Fabricius, the pupil of Linnæus, said many years ago, “nothing in natural history is more abstruse and difficult than an accurate description of the senses of animals."

No comparatively little about their senses.
N°

By a sense we mean that certain special nerves, on receiving an appropriate impulse, convey it to the brain, where it is translated (how, is as yet unknown) into its special sensation. We usually speak of ourselves as having five senses-smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing.

In the lower organisms, as the molluscs, the whole outer skin is sensitive; but some have also specialized organs of touch. These are usually hair-like processes. Thus, jelly-fish shoot out numerous threads, when touched, which enable them to attack the body pressing them. In fishes, touch is usually limited to the lips, parts of the fins, and to special organs called "barbels"; these are long pieces of skin.

The skin of crustacea and of insects is more or less horny, or, as has been said, the bee wears its skeleton outside; but even this armor-like surface is sensitive to touch, owing to little hairs or projecting, rod-like bodies seated on the coat, from the base of which a nerve-fibre passes through into the body. These little hairs are very numerous on the antennæ of insects, and are evidently sense-hairs of some kind, some of touch, others of other senses. This sense of touch is marvelously developed in spiders.

Bats have an extremely keen sense of touch, perhaps the most delicate of any creature, and are guided in their flight chiefly by this sense. The insect-eating bats have to be on