450 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cider, and sups on potatoes or cabbage greased with a bit of bacon 

 rind. And precisely the identical testimony, varying only the 

 staples of starvation, comes from Switzerland, Poland, and other 

 countries. Now, all this requires something, and that something 

 usually takes the form of something alcoholic. Poor Edgar Allan 

 Poe produced his fascinating prose and marvelous poetry on dinners 

 of herbs, and the well-fed, fat, greasy Honey-thunders and Podsnaps 

 recognize the crime, not in the fact that such a man was left to eat 

 such dinners, but that he took a glass of whisky to keep the life in 

 his poor unnourished body while he wrote. Therefore Mr. Reed 

 would make food as plentiful as Nature has enabled man to make it. 

 In other words, a condition of unfedness requires the human sys- 

 tem to crave alcoholic stimulants, and what the human system craves 

 it must find, since the craving becomes functional, and impossible 

 to disregard, malgre laws, systems, or statutes whatsoever. Even 

 the children in Switzerland, says Dr. Schuler (quoted by Mr. Reed), 

 are fed whisky between meals in order to sustain their tiny lives, the 

 low regimen ' of whose mothers has given them the frailest possible 

 hold on life to live at all. Mr. Reed believes also that, on public 

 grounds, other effort for amelioration should be made by the State, 

 such as shorter hours of labor, two holidays a week, etc. But as to 

 these we will not follow him here. He makes his point, however, 

 and his pamphlet is worth the consideration of philanthropists. It 

 can not be denied that, with the exception of the shorter hours for 

 labor and the general tendency to increase the number of holidays 

 (" Labor Day," Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Lincoln Day, etc.), much 

 of Mr. Reed's theories have got into our statute-books. And the 

 general tendency to ameliorate the condition of the laborer, which 

 is everywhere apparent in the United States, may fairly be alluded 

 to here as among statutory efforts to the universal betterment. 



[To be concluded.] 



EEGARDING changes in the language of science, as illustrated in the Eng- 

 lish Historical Dictionary, C. L. Barnes pointed out, in the Literary and 

 Philosophical Society of Manchester, England, that the words "astronomy" 

 and " astrology " have interchanged meanings since they were first intro- 

 duced, as is shown by Evelyn's speaking, in his Memoirs, of having dined 

 with " Mr. Flamsteed, the learned astrologer and mathematician." Gaule, 

 in 1652, spoke of chemistry as " a kind of prsestigious, cheating, covetous 

 magick " ; and even as late as 1812 Bentham spoke of the " unexpressive 

 appellation chemistry " as the single-worded synonym for " idioscopic or 

 orypto-dynamic anthropurgics." Atom originally meant a small interval 

 of time the 22,564th part of an hour. The word gas was suggested to Van 

 Helmont by the Greek chaos. " I called that vapor gas," he said, " an an- 

 cient mystery not long from chaos." Algebra was a branch of mathematics 

 and also the art of bone-setting, and both meanings are still used in Spain. 



