200 
NATURE 
[APRIL 22, 1915 

youth, eager for work and invention, gradually 
becoming skilled in the use of the best tools in 
doing fine metal work, able to turn his hand to 
glass-blowing and draughtsmanship and _half-a- 
dozen other arts, with a good working knowledge 
of chemistry, electricity, and other parts of 
physics; he was always proud of his strength 
and health. 
He made many inventions: mousetraps, gas 
machines, sprinklers to put out fires, a steam 
trap, locomotive head-lights, incandescent plati- 
num and carbon ‘electric lamps, the electric regu- 
lator for which he received the Légion d’Hon- 
neur; he demagnetised watches, and did many 
other interesting things. He relates many amus- 
ing anecdotes which illustrate the condition of 
things fifty years ago in Canada and the northern 
and also in the southern States. 
He was probably thirty-eight when he dis- 
covered that heating carbon in a hydrocarbon 
atmosphere caused carbon to be deposited in a 
vety hard form; we are not sure that he really 
claims the method of “flashing” a carbon fila- 
ment by keeping it hot in a hydrocarbon atmo- 
sphere, but the suggestion of a claim is evident. 
About the age of forty he was greatly engaged in 
the manufacture and use of dynamo machines, 
and he exhibited excellent lamps at the Paris Ex- 
hibition of 1881. Soon after this, in London, he 
invented and exhibited his automatic gun; a 
single barrel which discharged more than six hun- 
dred. ordinary rifle shots per minute, and for the 
next twenty years his time was mainly taken up in 
developing automatic guns of greater sizes. He 
records some of the praise which has been be- 
stowed upon his gun; no praise can be too great 
for it. We remember a toast which was drunk 
enthusiastically in London when the news of a 
certain conquest had just been published “To the 
Conqueror of Matabeleland, Hiram Maxim.” 
He made discoveries about gunpowder and other 
explosives. He seéms to be the first inventor of 
a smokeless powder. He describes all these 
things, but does not seem to think them of much 
more importance than his experiments on the 
roasting of coffee. 
He seems to have been the first to see clearly 
how a flying machine might be made to work, 
and Spent a very great deal of money in driving 
inclined planes horizontally through the air by 
means of an engine and air propellers, so that 
there should be sufficient vertical lifting force 
upon the planes. His machine did lift, and he 
seemed to be succeeding slowly, but his real 
difficulty was in the great weight of engine re- 
quired. The invention of the petrol engine easily 
made the aeroplane a real flight machine. 
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His } 

fellow directors seem occasionally to have thought 
that there was a loss of dignity in his allowing 
advertisements to appear of such things as his 
inhaler for asthma, and scientific ‘friends deplored 
his “prostituting his talents on quack nostrums.” 
His own comment upon this is that from their 
point of view the invention of a killing machine 
Was very creditable, but it was a disgrace to 
invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering. 
Just so, there are the two points of view. All 
through his life Sir Hiram was keen upon invent- 
ing anything that might be useful. He does not 
feel a loss of dignity in describing how he in- 
vented a simple, thoroughly good method of 
giving a proper surface to a black-board in a 
school, and he is no more ashamed of advertising 
his inhaler than of advertising his gun. 
His experience of lawyers and business men in 
America seems to make him rather bitter towards 
Americans. It is gratifying to find him saying: 
“The reception that I received in England and’ 
the straightforward honesty of the gentlemen 
with whom I had to deal, gave me a very favour- 
able opinion of the English character.” Jee 

APPEARANCE AND REALITY. 
(1) William James and Henri Bergson: A Study 
in Contrasting Theories of Life. By Dr. H. M. 
Kallen. Pp. xi+248. (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press; London: Cambridge University 
Press, 1914.) Price 6s. net. 
(2) The Mirror of Perception. By L. Hall: 
Pp. 129. (London: Love and Malcomson, Ltd., 
1914.) Price 2s. 6d. 
(3) What is Adaptation? By Prof. R. E. Lloyd. 
Pp. vii+1ro. (London: Longmans, Green and 
Co., 1914.) Price 2s. 6d. net. 
(4) The Story of Yone Noguchi: Told by Himself. 
Pp. xi+255. (London: Chatto and Windus, 
HOAs) Price 6s. net 
(1) OT the least useful contribution to philo- 
sophy made by William James was a 
negative one, viz., the ignoring of the traditional 
antithesis between reality and appearance. ‘This 
antithesis may safely be said to have been the 
original sin of metaphysics since meditation 
began, and James’s philosophy may most fruit- 
fully be studied from this starting-point. The 
older philosophers, logical and static, discrimin- 
ated between appearance and reality “in one or 
all of the compensatory terms of God, freedom, 
immortality, and cosmic unity”; and later, “in 
response to the pressure of rapidly growing 
sciences, men faced fact, only to change it in 
such wise’ as thereby to satisfy the inner need 
for logical consistency.” But James “insisted 
