426 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



available. When textile manufactures be- 

 gan to pass from the condition of purely do- 

 mestic industries to that of a factory system, 

 the principal mills were erected near river 

 falls, no other power than water power hav- 

 ing been found practically useful. " About 

 1 790," says Mr. Kennedy, " Mr. Watt's steam 

 engine began to be understood, and water- 

 falls became of less value. Instead of carry- 

 ing the work-people to the power, it was found 

 preferable to place the power among the peo- 

 ple." The whole tendency of the conditions 

 created by the use of steam power has been 

 to concentrate the industrial population in 

 large communities, and to restrict manufactur- 

 ing operations to large factories. Economy 

 in the production of power, economy in super- 

 intendence, the convenience of the subdivis- 

 ion of labor, and the costliness of the ma- 

 chines employed, all favored the growth of 

 large factories. The whole social conditions 

 of manufacturing centers have been pro- 

 foundly influenced by these two conditions — 

 that coal for raising steam can be easily 

 brought to any place where it is wanted, and 

 that steam power is more cheaply produced 

 on a large scale than on a small scale. It 

 looks rather, just now, as if facilities for dis- 

 tributing power will to some extent reverse 

 this tendency. Water power, where it is 

 available, is so much cheaper and more con- 

 venient than steam power that it has never 

 been quite vanquished by steam power. 



Electric Units. — The committee of the 

 British Association on electrical standards 

 have proposed the following resolutions, with 

 a view to their adoption internationally : " (1) 

 That the resistance of a specified column of 

 mercury be adopted as the practical unit of 

 resistance. (2) That 14 - 4521 grammes of 

 mercury in the form of a column of mer- 

 cury 106 - 3 centimetres long at 0° C. be the 

 specified column. (3) That standards in 

 mercury or solid metal having the same re- 

 sistance as this column be made and depos- 

 ited as standards of resistance for industrial 

 purposes. (4) That such standards be peri- 

 odically compared with each other, and also 

 that their values be redetermined at inter- 

 vals in terms of a freshly set up column of 

 mercury." With regard to the units of cur- 

 rent and electromotive force, it was agreed 

 that the number •001118 should be adopted 



as the number of grammes of silver depos- 

 ited per second from a neutral solution of 

 nitrate of silver by a current of one ampere, 

 and the value l - 434 as the electromotive 

 force in volts of a Clark cell. Prof. Ton 

 Helmholtz expressed his full concurrence in 

 these decisions. 



Power of Hypnotic and Vernal Sugges- 

 tion. — Some most remarkable instances, tax- 

 ing credulity, of the power of hypnotic sug- 

 gestion were related at the recent Interna- 

 tional Congress of Experimental Psychology 

 in London. A communication from Dr. Lie- 

 bault told of a case of suicidal monomania 

 cured by suggestion, the effect of which he 

 hoped would be, with a few renewals, dura- 

 ble. In such cases the practitioner insists 

 on making repeated affirmations of cure and 

 multiplying the seances. Prof. Delbceuf had 

 removed pain by causing the patient to exer- 

 cise his will, and had cured a woman pos- 

 sessed with the idea of killing her husband 

 and children — charming away the morbid 

 thought by degrees for two hours, then for 

 a day, and then for a week. Dr. Bramwell, 

 of Goole, presented four of his patients in 

 proof of his claim that he could command 

 pain away by the mere spoken word, without 

 inducing the hypnotic trance. He had re- 

 cently painlessly extracted seven teeth from 

 the woman of the group by merely order- 

 ing her not to feel pain ; but failed in the 

 eighth tooth, because she had previously 

 formed the conviction that she would feel 

 pain, so that her self-suggestion overbore his 

 suggestion. The same patient had suffered 

 from myopia, being able to read only the 

 third line in the ordinary table of test let- 

 ters. On his suggestion she had been able 

 to read all the lines ; and he could put her 

 into the myopic state or relieve her from it 

 by the word of command. He had been able 

 to produce the same satisfactory results with 

 all his patients by the mere command in a 

 waking state that he had previously produced 

 in a trance. The mere fact of his giving a 

 written order to a patient to sleep enabled 

 the patient to take that order, read it, and go 

 to sleep whenever he needed to do so. He 

 had repeatedly sent patients to a dentist car- 

 rying with them a written order not to feel 

 pain, which they read when they sat down in 

 the dentist's chair. He had now patients who 



