sequence, annihilated, but rather remanded for repairs, for refinement and etherealiza

tion.

Formerly we stood in awe of the electric current because we could only feel it. Now we have made it visible in the violet ray, and Edison has announced his latest success in bottling supplies of it for long distance travel.

This sets us to asking if it is not unquestionably a ponderable material? And if this be conceded, and if its virtual identity with the vital spark be also conceded, it follows that the vital spark is material, hence, indestructible and immortal!

Is Science thus closing up the gaps in her hitherto lame logic? Is the materialist on the eve of surrender to the spiritist? Or, on the contrary, is the spiritist rapidly losing every vestige of his footing, and merging into the out-and-out materialist?

Is the vague and dreamy "Nirvana" of the Brahmin emerging from the realm of shimmering shadows, and taking tangible form on the retouched negative with which Science is rapidly resetting and illuming her landmarks? In short, has not the alert scientist at last begun in earnest to translate the handwriting-not on the wall, but traced in the air? The result will be that he will no longer be inclined to deny anything, nor to assert without some misgivings things that have all along been accredited as established and unchangeable.

Prof. Langley even goes so far as to admit that there is no such thing as a "law of nature," that the law of gravitation, like all the others, is only an apparent law of nature, and that all so-called "laws of nature" are not external to us, but from within— laws of our own minds-in reality a product of our own natures.

Given, any so-called "law," in a state of quiescence it maintains its identity and equilibrium; but split off an electron from an atom (electrical excitation) and the quiescent condition, dubbed "law of nature," is broken up; even the law of gravitation is annulled, and something occurs that an

swers every condition of aforetime miracles.

We shall keep an eye on these later developments, and may have more to say of them from time to time.

That lupus exedens, epithelioma and carcinoma, along with locomotor ataxia-and possibly leprosy itself-have at last been summoned to their Waterloo, seems more than probable, and it is a triumph which amply repays all the struggles of the century.

THE SPEAKING TUBE NUISANCE.

SANITARY writers and authorities have expended no little breath and anxiety over the telephone trumpet as a means of infection and disease transmission.

Has it never occurred to them that this source of contagion is insignificant in comparison with that of the speaking tubes so extensively, we may say universally, used in the apartment houses, and in some business offices, in all the large cities?

Near every dumb-waiter shaft is a row of flaring mouthpieces, one for each apartment. All the delivery boys, grocers' and butchers' clerks, express messengers, truck peddlers, huxters, janitors, and occasional tramps, use these open appendages freely and often. In using them one does not hold the mouth at a little distance as in case of the telephone, but the lips must be pressed firmly into the flaring funnel, so as to prevent the vigorously blown breath from escaping backwards, otherwise the whistle above will not "blow."

A hundred times a day, every day in the year, the inmates of the various apartments are "whistled up" by Tom, Dick and Harry, from the outside, and by the janitor or some of his family from his subterranean quarters inside. Each time the mouth of the whistler is pressed closely into the whistle, and saliva, with any accidental secretions or exudations froin healthy and unhealthy,

clean or unclean mouths, alike, are freely deposited, for the benefit of the next user! People spleen against handling old paper money, or the picking up of a pocket handkerchief or glove in the street car; they agitate the dangers of the communion cup, the kissing of the book, and a hundred other remotely possible, but highly improbable means of infectious contamination, but we have yet to hear a word of protest against this speaking-tube source of direct infec tion, which is certainly a thousand times as dangerous as all the others combined.

Possibly we have overlooked such mention, but certainly we are not aware that any health authority has ever been invoked to correct this serious evil. There is no doubt in the world but that thousands of cases of mysteriously disseminated infections, especially diphtheria, could be traced to the swapping of buccal secretions and disease germs at the lower end of apartment house speaking tubes.

Boards of Health in every city will fail to do their whole duty until they have forever abolished the whistle attachment of all speaking tube systems. The class of people who use them are the very ones who are subject to the various infectious diseases. It is not at all uncommon to see a semihoodlum from a delivery wagon remove his cigarette from lips that are scabbed over with herpes, or something worse, to crowd them into the several whistles connected with the kitchens of his customers above.

The calling should be done by an electric bell, and the tubes used simply as speaking tubes, in which case the lips do not touch them, and the danger is reduced to a mini

mum.

Wake up, Sanitary Inspectors, and make an end of this vilest and most prolific of ail the sources of personal infection.

Better a small army of smallpox patients stalking the streets, than these sneaking and unsuspected rows of bacteria-breeding whistles the culture tubes that gape in every apartment house basement, and de duty eighteen hours of the day and 365 days in the year, in all our cities.

A SOCIAL CONTRAST.

THERE are two kinds of passengers on every train. One kind ride in Pullman coaches, on through passes, procured through a "pull." They take their meals in the "diner," select the items from an illuminated menu card, on which the figures vary from a dollar-and-a-half for a steak to twenty-five cents for a cup of cocoa or coffee, with wine at two dollars and a half for half a pint. There is a barber, a bathroom, a library, and a ladies' maid in attendance, with a telegraph operator and a stenographer in an office compartment adjoining.

The other class ride in an ordinary coach, pay their fares in hard-earned cash from st station to station, at full schedule rates, because they are used to the installment plan. They lunch out of a pasteboard shoe box, and drink cold tea out of a bottle. Their library consists of a twenty-five cent novel which they bought for ten cents on a bargain counter, and were cheated even at that. The bill of fare could be duplicated for ten or fifteen cents at any lunch counter.

At the end of the journey one will be driven in a cab or rolled in an auto to the Waldorf-Astoria, or the Auditorium, or the Hotel del Coronado. The other will hunt for a dollar-a-day European plan house, on an obscure street, and get along with two fifteen-cent meals a day, and half a pound of crackers nibbled in his room in the hotel. And yet the latter class may be worth ten times as much to the world as the former.

HALF rates will now be granted by the German railroads to all persons traveling to or from the Sanatoria.

ACCORDING to statistics the number of female physicians throughout the entire world is about 8,000, two-thirds of whom live in America.

FADS IN PHYSICAL CULTURE.

THE professional "Health" journals have recently taken to glaring cuts, for the most part photo-engravings of naked Sampsons, with arms akimbo, displaying immensely developed biceps, flexor and extensor muscles.

Naked truth seems to be a stock in trade. It is getting tiresome.

The naked facts of sensible physical culture, stripped of these overdone examples of nakedness, are very simple.

Too much muscle is as much a calamity as too much adiposity. A great many "Physical Culturists" are inculcating hurtful doctrines. They would make the public, especially the young, believe that to cultivate an enormous shell of muscle is to become enormously healthy. The early and unexpected collapse of Dr. Winship some years ago, after he had developed his muscles until he could lift an ox weighing a ton, more or less, ought to have opened the eyes of the public, or at least of all medical men. There have been many more recent instances, and still the faddists go on with their false teachings. Most of this teaching is done with a view to the sale of special apparatus or some special system "by mail" at bargain-counter prices.

In as far as any of these "systems" induce indolent and indifferent people to do some motions and take some exercise they do good. But when they result in causing callow youths to go "culture" daft in an effort to imitate these "naked" specimens of over-developed muscular systems, they do untold harm.

The man with overbig muscles is never a healthy man, and furthermore he is liable to collapse without notice.

Every one can adopt a "system" for himself. It needs but one plain, simple but effective and universal rule:

Practise a series of body and limb motions that exercise and put into natural but moderate use every principal muscle in the body.

It need not puzzle anyone who has a

thimbleful of common sense to discover what movements will do this. When determined their practice for five to fifteen minutes daily, say on rising and before retiring, is ample for health purposes.

As a suggestion, take three forms of

movements:

1.

Standing firmly on the separated feet, hands on the hips, sway or twist the body in all directions, forward, backward, to each side, turning or twisting the trunk so as to put all the abdominal muscles on the stretch.

2. Squat to the floor and rise abruptly, repeating the process a dozen times.

3. Swing, kick and punch (imaginary bags or make-believe burglars) with each one of the limbs in rotation until you have made every motion you can think of.

All this can be quickly learned without the aid of a "Professor," of myology, there is no mystery about it, and it does not incur any risk of overdoing the muscles at the expense of other vital organs or of turning its devotees into "culture" cranks.

SELF-MEDICATION.

IT is said that when a doctor prescribes for himself he has a fool for a patient.

In that case, when a patient, that is a layman, prescribes for himself his patient is an idiot-the bloomingest of blooming idiots.

And yet, the streets are full of men and women who think they are cheating the family physician by prescribing for themselves. You can find quinine pills in every other man's pocket and all sorts of corn cures, headache tablets, pile cures, liver regulators, kidney correctors, lithia tablets and anti-rheumatics in every domestic cupboard.

Where these grosser remedies are discarded there will be a whole case of homo-sugar pellets and granules, representing the "third decimal," or the three hundredth centesimal attenuation of apismel, aurum, bella-bryon-calcarea-carb, or

carbo-veg, digital-kali-carb-lac-canth-mercviv-and so on throughout the alphabetand they will be resorted to on every surreptitious sneeze, twinge of a corn, or unusual wink of the eye.

On this prolific subject the editor of (London) Health very aptly says:

Although a man would not think of meddling with his watch or his clock, or any piece of mechanism, but would entrust its repair only to a competent workman, he often meddles with his health and physical constitution in the most reckless way. He will take medicines that are only. of use in some entirely different circumstances, on the mere guess that his symptoms are the same as those for which the medicine was originally prepared. Women are particularly prone to do this. They fearlessly fill up old medicine bottles, and use them in cases where there is not the slightest analogy to the case for which the medicine was originally prepared. They make the most reckless diagnosis. They exchange information as to what the doctors did for their children under what seemed to them similar circumstances, and which may be entirely different. They may not know the difference between a common cough and membranous croup, but they will

tackle the most dreadful disease with the inappropriate remedy. By the time the doctor comes, the patient has already been experimented upon, and has risked death. by delay or by the struggle with hurtful medicaments. The dangerous feature about the self-administration of opiates is that the subject keeps on taking the drug while partially deprived by its use of the power of reason or the benefit or memory. The legitimate use of such agents requires the greatest care and caution. They must be adapted to the system of the recipient and to the special occasion. What would be harmless to a person at one time would be dangerous at another. It is well known that narcotic poisons are cumulative; that they go piling up in the system, like steam collecting in a boiler. No harm is done, until at last the exploding point is reached.

LECITHIN.

LECITHIN (derived from a Greek word meaning yolk of egg) found in semen, brain matter, nerve tissue, the leucocytes of the blood, the yolk of egg, and many other sources, was first discovered by Gobley and studied later by Strecker. Its therapeutical value as an assimilable form of organic phosphorus, has been acknowledged by a number of authorities who have given this subject attention. Chemically LECITHIN is found to be made up of certain acid glycophosphates and it is unnecessary to add that the phosphorus of the human organism, exists as glycero-phosphates.

The first important studies connected with the role of LECITHIN in nutrition, are due to Danilewski. In 1897 the "Societé de Biologie de Paris" received on this subject an extremely interesting communication from Charrin. Selensky (a pupil of Danilewski), has been able to show that its action on the red corpuscles is remarkably beneficial. Numerous authorities have since studied the physiological effects of LECITHIN and all agree that it assists nutrition, favors assimilation of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, so essential to the economy. The conclusions of Desgrez and Ali Zaky recently published by the "Societé de Biologie" are on the same lines, so also are those of Gilbert and Fournier, who treated a number of phthisical and neurasthenic patients with results showing improvement in appetite, weight, strength and general health.

Lancereaux, Gilbert and Fournier (Bull. de l'Acad. de Med. de Paris) have used Lecithin in the various stages of epuisement occurring in diabetics, with the happiest results, particularly in the more advanced stages, with a daily depreciation of the patient's weight and vitality.

We are therefore justified in concluding that Lecithin is worthy of a trial as a means of checking the drain of the vital nutritive physiological functions, caused by pathological conditions.

To improve the human race, mentally and physically, has been the aim of philosophers at intermittent periods from time immemorial. During the past few years the matter has been again brought forward with much persistence, and various schemes-mostly impossible-have been suggested to attain this object.

The ancient Greeks would seem to have most nearly solved the problem, but as their system was based upon the principle of the survival of the fittest, a reversion to so coldblooded a method would hardly be in keeping with the humanitarian spirit of the present age.

Laws regulating marriage are in favor with many, and are in force to a limited extent. The close confining of criminals, and even their asexualization, are projects which have received some consideration at the hands of some earnest anthropologists.

No plan as yet advanced but presents difficulties in the way of realization apparently insuperable.

SIR FRANCIS GALTON.

recently delivered the second Huxley lecture of the year at the British Anthropological Institute, and took as his subject the possible improvement of the human breed under the existing conditions of law and sentiment.

Sir F. Galton in part said: "The possibility of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that of repressing the productivity of the worst. They both raise the

average, the latter by reducing the undesirables, the former by increasing those who will become the lights of the nation. It is, therefore, all important to prove that favor to selected individuals who might so increase their productivity as to warrant the expenditure in money and care that would be necessitated. An enthusiasm to improve the race would probably express itself by granting diplomas to select a class of young men and women, by encouraging their intermarriages, by hastening the time of marriage of women of that high class, and by provision for rearing children healthily. The means that might be employed to compass these ends are dowries, especially for those to whom moderate sums are important, assured help in emergencies during the early years of married life, healthy homes, the pressure, of public opinion, honors, and, above all, the introduction of motives of religious or quasi-religious character.

Sir F. Galton dwells with insistence upon religious enthusiasm as a spur to improve the race, and rightly says, so noble is its aim that it might well give rise to the sense of a religious obligation.

Nevertheless, it is to be feared that the religion or cult of physical improvement will not quite prove a stimulus sufficiently strong to induce persons to marry those best suited to them.

THE FACT IS UNDOUBTED

that many most fitting marriages are hindered from prudential reasons; but this is