EDITOR'S TABLE, 



699 



gave a new impetus to the movement 

 by founding the first American univer- 

 sity chair of sociology to be officially 

 called by that name, and by calling to 

 it Prof. Giddlngs, who holds that social 

 ethics can never teach us what social 

 relations ought to be until sociology has 

 analyzed and classified them as they 

 are; discovered how, through an evolu- 

 tionary process, they came to be as they 

 are ; and explained in terms of natural 

 causation why tliey are what they are, 

 and not in all respects what we might 

 wish them to be. 



For university purposes it is obvious- 

 ly necessary to limit rather definitely the 

 field of sociology, because a consider- 

 able part of the comprehensive and de- 

 tailed study of society falls within the 

 departments of pohtical economy and 

 public law. ITow the lines of demarca- 

 tion ought to he drawn, with due re- 

 gard to a logical classification, has been 

 a question of practical interest to teach- 

 ers, and the occasion of the recent an- 

 nual meeting of the American Economic 

 Association, in this city, was made the 

 opportunity for a conference. The con- 

 clusion reached was that sociology is 

 the master science that co-ordinates the 

 special social sciences, and that, in teach- 

 ing, the co-ordination must be shown 

 not only by pointing out tbe interde- 

 pendent relations of the different groups 

 of social phenomena, a merely descrip- 

 tive process, but by concentrating atten- 

 tion on those phenomena that are so 

 elementary, or fundamental, that they 

 are found in all groups, and are presup- 

 posed by all the special social sciences. 

 Sociology is thus for university pur[)Oses 

 tlie science of social elements and first 

 principles, and therefore the funda- 

 mental and co-ordinating social science; 

 a science of what is and has been, sharp- 

 ly distinguished from social ethics, but 

 oflfering to social ethics legitimate data 

 for a study of what ought to be. 



With sociology as thus conceived 

 more and more thoroughly taught in 

 our universities, we may hope that the 



educated public will begin to entertain 

 truer notions of what society is, and of 

 the laws of its evolution. 



MORE FACTS ABOUT DIPHTHERIA 

 ANTITOXINE. 



Since the writing of Dr. Armstrong's 

 paper on the treatment of diphtheria 

 by antitoxine serum, published in the 

 Monthly for February, certain addi- 

 tional data have appeared that seem 

 worth presenting to our readers. 



Prof. Jaime Ferran, of Barcelona, 

 has called attention to the fact that in 

 April, 1890, he pubhshed a paper in 

 which he described a safe and practical 

 method of immunizing animals against 

 fatal doses of the diphtheria poison, and 

 thus he anticipated Prof. Karl Fraenkel's 

 communication on the same subject by 

 eight months. But, unfortunately for 

 the Spanish bacteriologist, he did not 

 carry his experiments to the ultimate 

 point to which Behring carried Fraen- 

 kel's investigations, resulting in the anti- 

 toxine serum. 



Eecent investigations in relation to 

 the duration of immunization have shown 

 that the antitoxic properties of the se- 

 rum of children who have had diphthe- 

 ria do not appear until between the 

 eighth and tenth days after recovery 

 from the disease, but the property per- 

 sists for several months. Antitoxic se- 

 rum, however, immunizes more rapidly 

 than the disease itself, but it does not 

 produce a refractory state of equally 

 long duration. 



A further evidence of the value of 

 the antitoxine serum is shown by a pa- 

 per by Dr. Moizard, who administered it 

 in two hundred and thirty-one cases of 

 diphtheria in the Paris Trousseau Hos- 

 pital, with a mortality of only 14-7 per 

 cent. During the same months, Octo- 

 ber and November, in other years the 

 mortality had never been less than fifty 

 per cent. Prof. Widerhofer, of Vienna, 

 treated one hundred patients with the 

 serum, with a mortality of twenty-four 



