712 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Berlin, by means of which the interior of the 

 head and chest may be directly examined by 

 means of the fluorescent screen, even the 

 action of the heart and lungs being discern- 

 ible. A demonstration was recently given 

 by Dr. Oscar Levy at the Lancet offices, and 

 was reported as very successful. The vacu- 

 um tube employed contained two concave 

 electrodes, midway between which was situ- 

 ated a platinum disk in a plane of 45°. One 

 or other of the electrodes, according to which 

 gives the best results, is connected up, by 

 means of a wire, to this disk, the wires of 

 the coil being attached to the concave elec- 

 trodes, so that the anode is duplicated. The 

 screen employed measured about ten by 

 eighteen inches, and consisted of small crys- 

 tals of platinocyanide of barium. 



The Present Business Depression. — An 



article in the July Engineering Magazine, by 

 Edward Atkinson, attributes the present 

 business depression to the Bland and Sher- 

 man acts, " under which the demand debt of 

 the United States was increased by an issue 

 of notes or promises to pay by nearly five 

 hundred million dollars for the purchase of 

 silver bullion, which, when coined into dollars 

 at 16 to 1, is bad money. We may easily 

 trace the cause of our present bad condi- 

 tions to the enforced use of bad money." 

 He presents the conditions under the free 

 coinage of silver in a somewhat new light, 

 and makes it obvious that, instead of giving 

 the poor man an undue advantage, it will in- 

 crease the opportunities of the rich, and 

 instead of benefiting the United States it 

 will place her at a disadvantage and make her 

 mints common dumping ground for all the 

 depreciated silver of the world. He says : 

 " The advocates of the free coinage of silver 

 dollars of full legal tender propose to enable 

 the bankers of Europe to gather in the sil- 

 ver bullion of the world, of which the mar- 

 ket value is now sixty-eight cents per ounce, 

 to send it to our mints to be coined without 

 charge, and then to force it upon our farm- 

 ers, wage-earners, and other persons at 

 $1.29-^ an ounce, thus cheating them out of 

 about half their dues for the benefit of two 

 privileged classes — the silver miners of the 

 West and the foreign bankers and their 

 agents of the East." This tendency on the 

 part of politicians to attempt by legislation 



to counter the result of natural forces is 

 always eventually quite futile, and, as in the 

 present case, is usually fruitful of much 

 suffering and anxiety in the business world. 

 The secondary place which silver now occu- 

 pies as a money metal is entirely a natural 

 growth due to causes over which statesmen 

 and governments have no control, and the 

 United States, even if she succeeds in legal- 

 izing an unlimited coinage of fifty-cent sil- 

 ver dollars, will simply, by purely artificial 

 means, be substituting an unnatural, un- 

 wieldy, and limited silver unit of value for 

 the compact, convenient, and widely used 

 gold unit. Not only would the resulting 

 currency be much less satisfactory than our 

 present one, but the change from one to 

 the other would almost surely involve serious 

 business troubles. 



Tlie Expert Witness. — Considerable at- 

 tention is being given by the more thought- 

 ful newspapers and some scientific journals 

 to the disreputable episodes which almost in- 

 variably occur when experts are called on for 

 testimony before the courts. The present 

 custom, which permits each side to call in its 

 own expert and pay him for his testimony, is 

 calculated to produce anything but expert 

 testimony, unless the term expert applies to 

 manipulation of facts to suit his client's case. 

 It would be about as conducive to justice if 

 each side were allowed to retain and pay a 

 judge and jury of its own. In fact, the 

 practice is so obviously calculated to defeat 

 instead of aid the ends of justice that it is 

 difficult to see how it ever originated. The 

 mere fact that a witness is employed and 

 paid by the defendant or plaintiflf uncon- 

 sciously enrolls him on that side, and there 

 are few experts whose testimony is not 

 modified by such an arrangement. This cus- 

 tom has led so often to a flat contradiction 

 regarding facts between opposing authori- 

 ties that the general public has lost confi- 

 dence in such testimony. This is, of course, 

 very unfortunate, as it is beyond question 

 that a man who has devoted his life to 

 a study, for instance, of poisons and their 

 effects on the body, is in a better position to 

 judge of the probabilities in a given case 

 than the ordinary layman or physician. 

 Under a system where the expert is called 

 by the court no question of bias could be 



