214 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 347 



dred students, and an average of one hundred medical students 

 graduate yearly. In Tokio alone there are numerous active medi- 

 cal societies and over twenty hospitals. 



Russian Study of Infectious Diseases. — An institute 

 has been founded in St. Petersburg for the experimental study of 

 infectious diseases and for prophylactic inoculations. The institute 

 is to be under the charge of Professor B. Anrep. 



French and German Tobacco. — The P^-ogres Medical, 

 July 13, 1889, gives a brief account of the international congress to 

 protest against the abuse of tobacco, which was recently held in 

 Paris. M. Ortolan made the interesting statement that the pro- 

 portion of nicotine in tobacco is less when the stalks grow close 

 together, and when the leaves are numerous and placed very low 

 upon the trunk. This is the reason, he said, why the German, who 

 smokes more than the Frenchman, poisons himself less. In the 

 former country tobacco-growing is free, whereas in France it is 

 regulated by the government, and the number of leaves to the stalk 

 is limited. French tobacco, he said, contains as much as six per 

 cent of nicotine. 



jELLY-FlSH Sting. — Bathers who have encountered the long 

 tentacles of a medusa will be pleased to know, says Medical News, 

 that the " sting," or erythema, may be speedily relieved by the ap- 

 plication of water rendered alkaline by common washing-soda, in 

 the proportion of an ounce of soda to about two quarts of water. 



The Dangers of Carbolic Acid. — The following letter 

 of Dr. Th. Billroth of Vienna has been published in the Lancet : 

 " I have lately seen four cases in which fingers which had suffered 

 a most insignificant injury became gangrenous through the uncalled- 

 for application of carbolic acid. Carbolic acid is now much less 

 used in surgery than formerly. We have only gradually become 

 acquainted with its dangers. The acid may not only cause in- 

 flammation and gangrene, but also blood-poisoning, and so may 

 even prove fatal. It is useful only in the hands of a skilful sur- 

 geon, and ought never to be used without his advice." 



Ventilation in Iceland. — The extreme cold of the winter 

 in Iceland reduces the system of domestic ventilation in that coun- 

 try to very primitive principles. A traveller there was so choked 

 one night by the close atmosphere of the air-tight little chamber in 

 which he slept, with all the male members of the family, as to be 

 compelled to wake his host, who sprang out of bed at the call, 

 pulled a cork from a knot-hole, in the wall for a few minutes, anfl 

 then, replacing the cork with a shiver, returned to bed. 



Leprosy in Hawaii. — It is estimated that there is one leper 

 to every forty of the inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands. Speak- 

 ing of leprosy, Medical News states that a Chinese leper was re- 

 cently discovered in the Sacramento jail. He had been sent there 

 for refusing to pay a poll-tax. 



Freedom of Air from Germs. — Dr. Le Fort says that mi- 

 crobes are never conveyed in the air, but only by contact with the 

 fingers, instruments, etc. 



Cholera. — Two cases of cholera, one of which terminated 

 fatally, are reported to have occurred in Hungary. Cholera has ap- 

 peared also in Mesopotamia, as shown by the following despatch, 

 pubhshed in the Marine Hospital Service Bulletin under date Sept. 

 13: " Cholera, since July 27, made its entry into Mesopotamia in as 

 mysterious a manner as it made its appearance into Egypt in 1883. 

 It is certain that it penetrated from Bombay via Bassora ; it could 

 not as yet be determined how, perhaps (as in Egypt) through 

 Arabian stokers (firemen), who are employed on the English 

 steamers of the Bassora-Bombay line, and who, upon their arrival 

 at Bassora, go to their homes. At first cholera appeared at Schatra 

 (3,000 inhabitants), two and a half days' journey from Bassora, at the 

 Schatel-Hay Canal, which connects the Tigris with the Euphrates 

 River. In a few days, from July 27 to Aug. 6, 308 persons died. On 

 the 1st of August it appeared at Naszrie (8,000 inhabitants), south- 

 erly from Shatra, near the embouchure of the Schatel-Hay into the 

 Euphrates, — a city which was founded in 1872 by Natir Pacha, the 

 Montefik sheik. From the ist to the gth of August, 293 deaths 

 occurred, on the 8th of August so many as 85. The houses are 



situated upon the fiat marsh-land, and are only reed huts. The 

 inhabitants carry on the culture of rice and some cattle-raising. It 

 finally made its appearance at Bassora on Aug. 6, and at first an 

 Arabian girl died who had come there ten days before from Filie 

 in Persia. On Aug. 9, 15 deaths occurred there. The reports 

 of Gazala, the sanitary physician, do not allow any doubt to arise 

 as to the diagnosis." 



MENTAL SCIENCE. 

 Experiments upon Association of Ideas. 



In Mind, No. 54 (" Mental Association investigated by Experi- 

 ment," by J. McK. Cattell and Sophie Bryant, D.Sc), is printed 

 an account of experiments upon certain very usual mental products, 

 which commands interest not so much for the intrinsic value of the 

 results obtained as for the suggestiveness of the inquiry that it 

 opens up. An association as ordinarily studied begins with the 

 perception of a written or spoken word, includes the calling-up of 

 another idea by thfe first, and ends with the expression of the asso- 

 ciated word by mouth or pen. The characteristic element in the 

 process is the central one, while the perception and the expression 

 factors have a somewhat mechanical role to play, and must be 

 eliminated in the study of the association process ^«r se. 



The two aspects of association studied in the present research 

 are (i) the time taken up in mental association, and (2) the nature 

 of the association. The difficulty in studying the former is that the 

 time taken up by perception and expression is not absolutely sepa- 

 rable from the association time, the two processes in part overlap- 

 ping. In experiments specially designed to study the perception 

 and expression times, it was found that it takes about half a second 

 to see and name a word, so that approximately the difference be- 

 tween the entire time and half a second will be the association- 

 time. The same 20 nouns were used with about 500 observers, 

 and 6 observers answered to groups of about 250 words. Former 

 experiments in which it was possible to eliminate the mechanical, 

 elements had shown that it took Dr. Cattell, on the average, .380 of 

 a second to make an association with a concrete noun, and .508 of 

 a second with an abstract noun ; the time for an association with a 

 verb being intermediate, .465 of a second. The abstractness of the 

 word renders the association process difficult, this being especially 

 evident in extreme cases. Thus, to make the association deliver- 

 ance-hope required 1.453 seconds; civilization-wilderness, 1.064 

 seconds ; while the quickest associations were good-bad (. 11 1 of a 

 s&conA),father-7nother (.132 of a second), and the like. Individual 

 variation regarding the time of association is of course large, and 

 the stage of mental development is an equally important considera- 

 tion. It was found that thelaoys in an upper class of a German- 

 gymnasium took considerably less time to respond with associa- 

 tions to a given series of words than the boys in a lower class. 



A somewhat different method of investigation consisted in giving- 

 simply the first word, and asking the subject to write as many 

 suggested words as possible within 20 seconds. From this the 

 average association time (including the very long writing time) 

 can be calculated. This was tried with four forms of a London 

 girls' school, with a Dublin girls' school, with some students of 

 Bryn Mawr College, and with some London and Irish graduates- 

 A very distinct shortening of the time accompanies the advance in 

 form. When the average age of the pupils was 12.7 years, the 

 average time for concrete nouns was 6.9 seconds ; at 14.8 years it 

 was 4.76 seconds ; at 16.3 years, 4.26 seconds ; at 17.8 years, 3.7 

 seconds. The corresponding time for the Bryn Mawr collegians 

 was 3.51 seconds. The associations with abstract words require 

 constantly more time than with concrete words, but this difference 

 diminishes as the mental development progresses. Furthermore, 

 the last class-rank bears a relation to rapidity of association, the 

 highest pupils showing a quicker time, though this relation is only 

 a general one. Some words more readily call up a series of words 

 than others. Fatigue and a variety of factors also enter to influ- 

 ence the association times, but their relative worth is not affected 

 by these disturbances. 



Turning to the nature of the association, we are at once struck 

 by the frequency with which a word suggests the same word to- 

 the minds of different persons. Four hundred and sixty-five per- 



