April 15, 1898.} 



SCIENCE. 



531 



way of results. There is nothing new in the 

 suggestion to transmit pictures electrically by 

 breaking them up into lines or dots, or to re- 

 flect the rays upon selenium cells, or to move 

 prisms by electro-magnets. The sole and only 

 point of any importance is : Has Herr Szcze- 

 panik yet got any real results ? The compli- 

 cated mechanical contrivances suggested cannot 

 be made to work as rapidly as is necessary with- 

 out some most amazing skill in construction. 

 A process block looks spotty unless its line- 

 structure is much finer than the fineness of 100 

 lines to the inch, or, in other words, unless the 

 square inch contains 10,000 points. Now as 

 the duration of luminous impressions on the eye 

 to give continuity is of the order of only one- 

 twelfth of a second (kinematograph views are 

 bad unless more than twelve pictures a second 

 are made to succeed one another), it follows 

 that to transmit pictures only one square inch 

 in area will require that the whole of these 10,- 

 000 points shall be successively imaged within 

 about one-twelfth of a second. Now, there is 

 no known electric mechanism which will oscil- 

 late a mirror or prism with precision at a fre- 

 quency of 120,000 a second, even though the 

 electric line is only a few yards long. To talk 

 of doing this through a line a thousand miles 

 long is, in the present state of mechanical and 

 electrical knowledge, sheer nonsense. To 

 make crude and wild suggestions is very easy. 

 To take out patents for crude suggestions is 

 quite feasible. To get newspaper articles de- 

 scribing them as facts is still easier. I will only 

 repeat : What has Herr Szczepanik done ? Why 

 conceal the fact^— if fact there be — in a maze of 

 verbiage ? ' ' 



At the Lehigh University Dr. Macfarlane has 

 just finished a course of six lectures on the 

 ' Algebra of the Complex Quantity and its ap- 

 plication to Alternating Currents.' He con- 

 sidered the principles which apply to the circular 

 complex quantity, the hyperbolic complex 

 quantity, and a complex quantity which is com- 

 posed of the circular and hyperbolic. All the 

 ideas were defined geometrically and the appli- 

 cation of each theorem to alternating currents 

 was pointed out. 



The United States Senate has passed unani- 



mously the bill appropriating $350,000 for the 

 exposition of American manufactured goods 

 suitable for export, to be held in Philadelphia 

 next year under the auspices of the Philadelphia 

 Museums and the Franklin Institute. The bill 

 carries an appropriation of $50,000 "for the col- 

 lection, in foreign markets, of samples of mer- 

 chandise of the character in favor and demand 

 therein, and of illustrating the manner in which 

 merchandise for such markets should be pre- 

 pared and packed, together with necessary data 

 concerning the samples to be displayed at the 

 Exposition for the instruction and benefit of 

 American manufacturers and merchants, and 

 thereby laying the foundation of a great system, 

 of national commercial education." The 

 samples of merchandise are to become the 

 property of the Philadelphia Museums. To 

 aid in providing buildings necessary for the 

 purposes of the Exposition, the buildings to be 

 erected on the land set aside by the city for the 

 permanent buildings of the Museums, and after 

 the close of the Exposition to be available for the 

 purposes of the Museums, the sum of $300,000 

 is appropriated. Out of such sum is to be paid 

 the expenses of collecting and installing such 

 an exhibit by the United States government as 

 may be found expedient and desirable. It is 

 provided that this appropriation shall not become 

 available until subscriptions, donations or ap- 

 propriations for the purposes of the Exposition, 

 aggregating at least $300,000, shall be obtained 

 by the Museum and Exposition Association. 



The Imperial Statistical Office has, according 

 to the Lancet, recently published the returns of 

 the causes of death in the towns of Germany of 

 more than 15,000 inhabitants from the year 

 1885 to the year 1895. These returns show 

 that from 1885 to 1894 there were 119,038 

 deaths from diphtheria or croup, the average 

 number thus being 11,904 per annum. The 

 maximum was reached in 1892 by 15,860 deaths 

 and the minimum in 1888 by 9,934 deaths. In 

 1895, when diphtheria antitoxin was first used 

 on a considerable scale, the deaths went down 

 to 7,266. The diphtheria death-rate was 10.69 

 per 10,000 of the population in the preceding 

 ten years and only 5.4 in 1895, so that the mor- 

 tality had fallen 49.48 per cent. Of 100 deaths 

 4:53 were caused by diphtheria from 1885 to 



