POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



279 



irritation now exists than formerly, it is 

 necessary to seek another cause for the 

 increase of cancer. " When we investigate 

 the personal history of cancerous persons, it 

 is impossible to avoid being struck by the 

 large number who speak of antecedent 

 trouble, worry, or mental anxiety. In par- 

 ticular, the face of the average woman suf- 

 ferer care-worn, thin, and anxious consti- 

 tutes a type well known at every general 

 hospital." The reason of the supposed con- 

 nection can not be explained ; " but the im- 

 mediate sequence is a matter of daily famil- 

 iarity, insomuch that it may be laid down as 

 an axiom wherever the antecedents of any 

 major cancerous growth are to be investi- 

 gated, ' Failing a mechanical exciting cause, 

 a neurotic is always to be found ' ; provided 

 only that sufficient evidence of previous 

 history and surroundings is procurable. 

 Moreover, it is to be noted that the female, 

 the more neurotic and emotional sex, are 

 the principal sufferers from cancer; also 

 that the organs in them by far the most 

 prone to diseases of this class are normally, 

 in health, specially and peculiarly influenced 

 by emotional conditions, and by states of 

 the central nervous system." The author 

 has made some inquiry into possible hered- 

 itary transmission of cancer, but failed to 

 find a sufficient proportion of cases of he- 

 reditary connection to justify his including 

 that among general controlling causes. 



Fine Quartz Fibers. In a lecture on 

 quartz fibers and their applications, Prof. C. 

 Vernon Boys began by explaining that the 

 physicist in making his experiments has 

 often to deal with very small forces, which 

 are sometimes measured by the direct pull 

 they exert, and sometimes by the twisting 

 effect they can produce when applied at the 

 end of an arm acting as a lever. It is often 

 necessary to be able to detect and measure 

 forces not larger than the weight of a mill- 

 ionth or even of a thousand-millionth of a 

 grain. If these are used to produce a twist 

 in a wire, the wire must be exceedingly thin 

 for the twist to be measurable. A wire 

 when reduced to one tenth of its original 

 thickness will only require one ten-thou- 

 sandth part of the force to twist it by the 

 same amount; and, consequently, we can 

 measure forces as small as we please if we 



can only get wires thin enough. Formerly 

 experimenters made use of metal wires, but 

 these were soon replaced by fibers of spun 

 glass, which can be got far finer. Glass, 

 however, has one great drawback, in that it 

 will not, when twisted, return to its original 

 position after removing the twisting force, 

 but acquires a permanent twist, and this 

 renders it very difficult to use in delicate in- 

 struments. If we want finer wires we must 

 turn to the single fibers obtained from the 

 cocoons of silk- worms. These are so fine 

 that in ordinary instruments the force re- 

 quired to twist them is so small as to be 

 considered quite negligible. Some three 

 years ago the lecturer constructed an instru- 

 ment (radiomicrometer) to measure the dif- 

 ference in the amounts of heat radiated from 

 different parts of the disks of the sun and 

 moon. In this instrument it was' necessary 

 to measure a force so excessively small that 

 even a silk fiber was too coarse. He there- 

 fore endeavored to obtain finer wires by 

 shooting a very light arrow, which drew 

 after it a very fine fiber of quartz from a 

 piece of molten quartz held in the flame of 

 an oxyhydrogen blowpipe. In this manner 

 a thread of quartz can be obtained which is 

 not more than one fifteen-thousandth of an 

 inch in diameter, and which will show an 

 appreciable twist with a force of a thousand- 

 millionth of a grain weight applied at the 

 end of a lever one inch long. The lecture 

 was illustrated by a number of experiments. 



Consumption Germs. Speaking at the 

 Sanitary Convention in Vicksburg, Miss., of 

 December, 1889, Dr. A. Arnold Clark, of 

 Lansing, Mich., accepted the germ as the 

 chief source of the disease, and referred to 

 experiments in which the germs had been 

 found on the walls of rooms where con- 

 sumptives had been ; they are derived from 

 the dried sputa of the patients. Animals, 

 according to Dr. Cagny, feeding on the 

 sputa die of consumption ; and the disease 

 has been produced by inoculating with the 

 sputa, by swallowing it, and by breathing it. 

 " When we think of the ten thousand con- 

 sumptives in Michigan who every hour in 

 the day are expectorating along our streets, 

 and even on the floors of public buildings, 

 post-offices, churches, hotels, railroad cars, 

 and street cars ; when we think how these 



