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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



already described that brought Dumas to the 

 reaction whereby hydrogen sulphide may be 

 oxidized to sulphuric acid. He found the 

 walls of one of the bath rooms at Aix-les- 

 Bains covered with crystals of calcium sul- 

 phate, which could have no other source 

 than the vapors liberated from the hot 

 water. 



Range of the Unman Voice. In dis- 

 cussing a paper read before the Section of 

 Physics of the American Association, Prof. 

 W. Le Conte Stevens remarked that the 

 lowest recorded tone of the voice is that of 

 a basso named Fischer, who lived during the 

 sixteenth century, and who sounded F , 

 about forty-three vibrations per second. Mr. 

 Stevens himself, without possessing a bass 

 voice, has sounded as low as A , fifty-three 

 and a third vibrations per second, when his 

 vocal cords were thickened by an attack of 

 catarrh. This, however, is under abnormal 

 conditions. The highest note hitherto re- 

 corded in the books was attained in singing 

 by Lucrezia Ajugari. At Parma in lYYO she 

 sang for Mozart several passages of extraor- 

 dinarily high pitch, one of which included 

 C 6 , two thousand and forty-eight vibrations 

 per second. She trilled in D 6 , eleven hun- 

 dred and fifty-two vibrations, and was able 

 to sing as low as G 2 , one hundred and ninety- 

 two vibrations, having thus a range of nearly 

 four octaves and a half. Ajugari's upper 

 limit has been attained by Ellen Beach Yaw, 

 of Rochester. Mr. Stevens has often esti- 

 mated, by comparisons with a tuning fork, 

 the pitch of a child's squeal while at play, 

 which has been repeatedly found to be in 

 excess of twenty-five hundred vibrations per 

 second, in one case as high as G , about 

 three thousand and seventy-two vibrations. 

 The total range between these extremes is in 

 excess of six octaves. 



Criminal Anthropology. Among rea- 

 sons for including anthropology among the 

 preparatory studies for medicine, Mr. Have- 

 lock Ellis refers to special branches of prac- 

 tice in which knowledge of it is of great 

 assistance such as practice abroad among 

 different races, and practice among the in- 

 sane at home, and in dealing with the phe- 

 nomena of crime. Numbers of criminals in- 

 herit their qualities and transmit them, and 



constitute a distinct class. Their increase 

 must be prevented by dispersing them and 

 checking the reproduction of their kind. In 

 the light of these principles, Lombroso has 

 constructed his system of criminal anthro- 

 pology. The Lancet says that in Paris 

 medical experts are appointed to examine 

 the persons arrested overnight, and to send 

 to asylums those whom they find to be trou- 

 bled with brain disease, whereby they are 

 secured from association with criminals and 

 soon may be restored to soundness. Dr. 

 Benedikt, of Vienna, has done great service 

 in this line of practice in his studies of 

 criminals of different types. Three factors 

 are named by Dr. Clouston which should be 

 taken cognizance of in criminal anthropol- 

 ogy, viz. : The heredity of the criminal ; his 

 brain, with its reactive and resisting qualities 

 in each case ; and the criminal's surroundings, 

 immediate and permanent. The first takes 

 account of the past history of the criminal's 

 family, and the transmission of its inherited 

 diseases into other diseases in offspring. 

 The second factor, involving the receptivity 

 and reactive power of the brain, its resources 

 in self-control, especially in withstanding 

 pain, fear, temptation, and other trials of the 

 moral sense, concerns a wide field and pre- 

 sents great difficulties to the investigator. 

 The third factor includes the mental and 

 social atmosphere in which the subject of 

 criminal anthropological inquiry has been 

 brought up, and must comprise early com- 

 panionship, moral and religious influence, 

 and whatever contributes to motive in its 

 less healthy tissues. " Those tracts of the 

 brain cortex organized for mental processes 

 are the field in which the future character of 

 the individual' criminal or non-criminal 

 germinates and grows ; they are, as Dr. 

 Clouston well puts it, ' the fullest of hered- 

 itary qualities, the most powerful, yet the 

 most notable, by far the most physiological- 

 ly valuable part of man,' and the question 

 that confronts the student of criminality he 

 formulates thus : ' Have we among us men 

 and women whose mental cortex is of such 

 quality that in its ordinary environment the 

 conduct of its possessors must necessarily be 

 an ti social and lawless ? and if so, what 

 anatomical, physiological, and psychological 

 signs are there to distinguish this criminal 1 

 cortex and its possessor ? ' " The Italian 



