THE vicissitudes necessarily incident to an out-door and primitive mode of life are never the first causes of any disease, though they may sometimes betray its presence. Bronchitis, nowadays perhaps the most frequent of all infantile diseases, makes no exception to this rule ; a draught of cold air may reveal the latent progress of the disorder, but its cause is long confinement in a vitiated and overheated atmosphere, and its proper remedy ventilation and a mild, phlegm-loosening (saccharine) diet, warm sweet milk, sweet oatmeal-porridge, or honey-water.
THE mortality tables, forming the theoretical basis of life insurance, having been explained, it remains to be shown how they are employed in practice. There is a fundamental difference between life and fire or marine insurance that must first be considered.
EFFORTS have been made, at all times in which the spirit of investigation can be said to have existed, to ascertain the condition of the interior of the earth. There has been no lack of unfounded assumptions on the subject, and fanciful hypotheses were held even down to a period in which correct conclusions had been reached upon it—to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
PRECEDING chapters have prepared the way for framing conceptions of the two fundamentally-unlike kinds of political organization, proper to the militant life and the industrial life, respectively. It will be instructive here to arrange in coherent order those traits of the militant type already incidentally marked, and to join with them various dependent traits ; and in the next chapter to deal in like manner with the traits of the industrial type.
OPENING ADDRESS BEFORE THE INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CONGRESS.
SIR JAMES PAGET
AS I look around this hall my admiration is moved not only by the number and total power of the minds which are here, but by their diversity, a diversity in which I believe they fairly represent the whole of those who are engaged in the cultivation of our science.
FOR the purpose of comparing the movement of the colored population before and since emancipation, we begin with the following table, which shows the percentage of colored increase in each of the slave States for the last decade of slavery :
THE study of astronomy reaches back to the very beginnings of history, and through all the ages the ablest intellects have been directed to the wellnigh impossible task of unraveling the celestial motions. The terrestrial observer not being located at the center of the motions of the solar system, the complexity arising from this compounding of the motion of the observer with the motion of the planet observed rendered the problem very difficult.
THE CONNECTION OF THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES WITH MEDICINE.
PROFESSOR T. H. HUXLEY
THE great body of the theoretical and practical knowledge which has been accumulated by the labors of some eighty generations, since the dawn of scientific thought in Europe, has no collective English name to which an objection may not be raised ; and I use the term “medicine” as that which is least likely to be misunderstood; though, as every one knows, the name is commonly applied, in a narrower sense, to one of the chief divisions of the totality of medical science.
IMPROVEMENTS in the arts and sciences have gradually modified the methods of producing iron and steel, and, in their turn, the arts and sciences have felt the reaction ; for all improvements in the manufacture of iron and steel have consisted, not so much in the production of a better quality of the article, as in the cheapening of production by the application of the principles indicated by the progress of science, and by the use of superior machinery.
I HAVE now presented some of the most curious and interesting facts concerning the intelligence of ants in general; I shall next proceed to state some of the more remarkable facts concerning the intelligence of certain species of ants in particular. LEAF-CUTTING ANTS OF THE AMAZON.—The mode of working practiced by these ants is thus described by Bates:
WHATEVER differences of opinion may exist respecting the meteorological influence of forests, it is generally agreed that in mountainous countries they play an important part in regulating water-courses and in preserving the soil on the slopes of the hills.
CATTLE-RAISING is far from having attained a sufficient importance in Brazil. Immense provinces, like those of Goyaz and Matto-Grosso, vast regions from the Amazon to the Parana, where cattle could be raised easily and without care, remain unutilized for want of a market and of convenient means of transport and conservation.
AMONG the original cultivators of astronomy who give honor alike to the American name and to the science of the age, a distinguished place must be assigned to CHARLES AUGUSTUS YOUXG, the present Professor of Astronomical Science in the College of New Jersey, at Princeton.
IN a previous letter I spoke about a negro, S. A. Butler, a resident of Shanghai, China. His career is quite remarkable. His parents were Africans, or pure negroes ; his father a preacher in Washington, D. C. He was educated in Paris, and there learned to speak French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
IT was the aim of Bacon to bring the great divisions of knowledge into unity. Tired of the sterility of the old philosophies, he proposed a new one that should be both a true interpretation of nature and lead to grand utilities. He divined the method, but his imagination outran the resources of his time, and he could not execute it.
THE first thing we have to say about this attractive and admirable little volume is, that it was sorely needed. It was wanted, not only because of the great interest of the subject, but because we have no work in English that deals with it in any satisfactory shape for general use.
The American Association at Cincinnati.—The thirtieth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science began at Cincinnati August 17th, and was one of the largest and every way most successful that the body has held.
MR. M. L. WADSWORTH has published at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the results of a microscopical study of the iron-ore, or peridotite, of Iron-Mine Hill, Cumberland, Rhode Island, a valuable ore similar to the ore of Tagberg, Sweden, of which an immense quantity occurs in mass.