Nov. 9, 1871] 



NATURE 



23 



from diseases and accidents peculiar to childbirth amount 

 to 4-83 per 1,000, they exceed this amount whenever 

 women pass within the walls of lying-in hospitals — in- 

 creasing to5,6, 7, and in one instance to above 19 per i,ooo- 

 If we confine our attention to puerperal diseases, we find 

 that, while the death-rate for all England from these is 

 r6i per 1,000, it mounts up in workhouses and other 

 lying-in establishments to 33, 3'9, 4T, and 143 per rooo. 

 In King's College Hospital lying-in ward, the puerperal 

 disease death-rate was nearly 29^ per 1,000. By using 

 Dr. Lefort's data, which give the death-rates from all 

 causes at home and in hospital, in various European 

 countries, it is fhown that the approximate death-rate at 

 home is 4 7 per 1,000, while in lying-in institutions it is 

 no less than 34 per 1,000. 



Miss Nightingale discusses the causes of these immense 

 death-rates, which, she reminds us, occur .among women 

 undergoing not a diseased, but a perfectly natural con- 

 dition, among whom a death " is little short of a calamity," 

 and "'almost a subject for an inquest." We cannot enter 

 into the discussion, but we can say distinctly what is the 

 impression produced by the evidence. It affords another 

 illustration of the danger of unenlightened philanthropy. 

 Some one takes pity on poor suffering women, and forth- 

 with builds an hospital for them or gets it built, without 

 a thought, apparently, of what organic laws of human 

 nature he is about to violate. Nature takes no account 

 of his good intentions, but just goes on, as Miss Night- 

 ingale has elsewhere said, " to levy her own cess in her 

 own way." 



The practical result of the whole discussion is that lying- 

 in establishments, as at present managed, are destruc- 

 tive of human life, and should be forthwith closed, and 

 that poor women should, as a rule, be attended at home. 



The case, however, is not altogether hopeless ; .md 

 Miss Nightingale proceeds to show how an institution for 

 training midwives and midwifery nurses can be planned 

 and managed without risk. The whole secret consists in 

 assimilating the establishment to home conditions, what- 

 ever the cost may be. The evidence shows that in such an 

 institution there would be no more risk than at home. The 

 difficulty, as it appears to us, would be in the cost and in the 

 perfection of management required, which could only be at- 

 tained by persons practically conversant with physiologi- 

 cal laws. But, at the same time, there can be no ques- 

 tion of the superior advantages for training which such an 

 institution would afford. This portion of the book is illus- 

 trated by plans of existing hospitals, and of the proposed 

 training school. It contains a large amount of valuable 

 detail in small coinpass, well worthy the attention of the 

 medical profession and the public at large ; concluding 

 with an appeal to women, desirous of entering on medical 

 studies, to make this department of practice their own. 



The book, as its title implies, is tentative, and there is 

 prefixed to it a quaint dedication to " the shade of Socrates' 

 mother," including a call for help to " the questioning 

 shade of her son, that I, who \vrite, may have the spirit of 

 questioning aright, and that those who read may learn 

 not of me but of themselves." If this Socratic spirit of 

 " questioning aright " were more cultivated, we should 

 have fewer philanthropic mistakes, and science would be 

 less troubled than it has been of late by dogmatic as- 

 sertions and crude speculations. 



OUR BOOK SHELF 



Text-Book of Geometry. Part I. By T. S. Aldis, M.A., 

 Senior Mathematical Master, Manchester Grammar 

 School. (Deighton, Bell, and Co.) 

 We arc much pleased with this book as a good text-book 

 for teaching geometry. It is evidently the work of one 

 who has been at the pains to consider well what are the 

 difficulties which the average pupil encounters. It is the 

 work, too, of one who has seen what the fault of the school 

 teaching of geometry has hitherto been, and who is deter- 

 mined, as far as lies in his power, to remedy it. The evil of 

 school-teaching has been that Euclid has been learned by 

 rote, or when things have not been so bad as that, its propo- 

 sitions have been regarded too much as only abstract truths, 

 which neither have been elucidated by, nor have been 

 used to elucidate natural phenomena or the ordinary things 

 of life. Mr. Aldis supplies this defect by an admirable 

 series of examples and exercises appended to each propo- 

 sition, calculated to give a practical turn to the whole 

 study in the mind of a beginner, and to familiarise him 

 early with the idea that he can really make use of the 

 subject, and, can .give it a vast variety of application. Mr. 

 Aldis frequently gives more than one demonstration of 

 the same proposition. This also is very useful in teach- 

 ing, inasmuch as it practically informs the pupil that the 

 truths of geometry are independent of any particular de- 

 monstration of them, and gets him into the habit of ap- 

 proaching any problem from more than one point of 

 view. The present is a first instalment. It contains 

 pretty nearly what is in Euclid's first four books. J. S. 

 Populdre IVissenschaftlkhe Vortnige. Von H. Helm- 

 holtz. 2te3 Heft. (Braunschweig: Verlag von F, 

 Wieweg. London : Williams and Norgate.) 

 This part of Helmholtz's essays reminds us in many 

 respects of Tyndall's lectures — in their clear and eloquent 

 language, eminently adapted for popular comprehension, 

 their freedom from technical expressions, except where 

 these are unavoidable, and in the original mode in which 

 well-known facts are dealt with and used to illustrate pro- 

 found scientific truths. The work contains six lectures, 

 of which three are devoted to recent advances in the 

 theory of vision, one to the correlation of the physical 

 forces, one to the conservation of force, and the last to the 

 objects and advances of science. In the three lectures 

 devoted to the eye, whilst extolling its perfection as an 

 instrument in the mode in which we use it, he points out 

 its various defects ; the bimd spot, the blind lines and 

 strife corresponding to the vessels, its incapacity to focus 

 equally red and violet rays, the want of uniformity in its 

 refraction as indicated by the lines that appear to proceed 

 from a star, &c. He discusses the various colours of the 

 spectrum,and represents this not in the mode usually adopted 

 of a circle with segments of various sizes corresponding 

 to the several primary colours, but as a triangle, of which 

 green, violet, and red occupy the angles, and blue, yellow, 

 and purple the sides, white having an eccentric position 

 near the yellow. Violet, which he was formerly indisposed 

 to regard as a primarycolour,he again admits,and he seems 

 inclined to advocate, as best explaining the phenomena 

 of colour-blindness, the views of Young ; that there are 

 special nerves for perceiving red, green, and violet rays, 

 an opinion that is less surprising in view of Brown Se- 

 quard's conclusions in regard to the number of channels 

 for special sensations contained in the spinal cord, and 

 which is also supported by the remarkable specialisation 

 shown by Helmhultz himself to occur in the branches of 

 the auditory nerve indicated by the phenomena of certain 

 defects of hearing. The chapters on the correlation of 

 the physical forces and the conservation of force, subjects 

 that are now famiUar to most scientific Englishmen, are 

 very interesting, as being, to use the German phrase, 

 amongst the original path-breaking essays on these sub- 

 jects. H. P. 



