October i8, 1889.] 



SCIENCE 



263 



a cheap edition of these books, and sold 10,000 copies within one 

 year. Popular text-booI<s seem to have the largest sales; and 

 Polubojarinow, the publisher, paid to the author of a series of 

 -arithmetics, Mr. Jewtushewskij, the sum of 50,000 rubles. From 

 the foregoing it will appear that the notion that Russian literature 

 is made up solely or largely of those writers whose works have thus 

 'far been translated into English — Turguenieff, Tolstoi', Dostoy- 

 evsky, and Gogol — is fallacious. As a writer in the Christian- 

 Union recently pointed out, it would be as just to England and 

 America to translate Dickens, Hawthorne, and Haggard into some 

 foreign tongue, and represent them as English literature, as it is to 

 Russian literature to be judged by the writings of the authors now 

 known to us through English translations. " Nothing could be 

 ■more unfounded or contrary to the fact than the impression which 

 is abroad that we have in these translations a "fair presentment of 

 Russian literature. In reality, we who only read English — and 

 even those of us who know French and German — have gained no 

 more of that literature than the faintest glimpse. With very few 

 exceptions, the books that have been Englished are all novels : they 

 are all novels of the modern period, but they do not do the smallest 

 justice to the novelists of that period. We rave about Turguenieff 

 and Tolstc'i, but what of Gontcharov, Pisemsky, and Pomyaldvsky, 

 and half a dozen others equally or unequally noteworthy, about 

 whom never a word is said .' And then what have the Russian 

 poets, the Russian essayists, the Russian historians, the Russian 

 scientists, done, that we should be kept in the most Cimmerian 

 darkness as to them and their works ? By what strange caprice 

 of translator or publisher or public is it that to Anglo-Saxon read- 

 ers Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboy^dov, Kylov, Bielinsky, Karamsin, 

 Bestyuzhev-Ryumin, Soloviev, Pisarev, Dobrolyubov, and so many 

 others, remain practically unknown ? All the more is there reason 

 to wonder at and deplore this neglect when it is remembered that 

 in ignoring writers like these we are taking special pains, as it 

 were, to hold unliquidated our manifest duty to a great race." 



ELECTRICAL NEWS. 



■New .Insulating Material. — A recent German patent for 

 a new insulating material for electric conductors specifies the use 

 of paper which has been thoroughly soaked in an ammoniacal 

 copper solution. The pasty mass is then pressed against the con- 

 ducting wires to be covered by means of rollers, and the whole is 

 finally submitted to strong pressure. When dry, the covered wire 

 ;is passed through a bath of boiling linseed-oil, being left in it 

 until the covering is saturated. This makes it elastic and imper- 

 ;meable to moisture. The covering is said to be durable, and effi- 

 ■cient as a non-conductor. 



Lead-covered Cables. — It has been accepted as an acknowl- 

 edged fact that lead-covered cables, when placed under ground in 

 creosoted wooden troughs, undergo a rapid deterioration of the 

 Jead sheathing, owing to the metal being converted into a carbon- 

 .ate; but closer research tends to show that this destruction need 

 not necessarily take place. Close observation of creosoted conduits 

 and lead-covered cables, laid at various times since 1884, appar- 

 ently prove, according to the London Electrical Review, that the 

 destructive agent usually present in freshly creosoted wood dis- 

 . appears almost entirely after a few years. A cable was laid up- 

 wards of two years ago in a conduit constructed in 1884, and at 

 this date there is but very slight trace of action on its surface, while 

 ipart of the same cable laid in an 1888 conduit shows considerable 

 ■scale of carbonate of lead after one year's exposure. Parts of the 

 same cable placed in other conduits about a year after their con- 

 struction show but little damage. One cable laid in 1885 is only 

 slightly affected, and it is not anticipated that any further deteriora- 

 tion will take place. Some experiments to test the effect of time 

 and ventilation on creosoted wood were carried out by placing 

 cables covered with an alloy of tin and lead in boxes made of 

 creosoted wood, one box made of wood creosoted more than two 

 years back, and another more recently impregnated. These boxes 

 were sealed up, and opened after a lapse of three months. The 

 samples in the old wood box were barely touched, while the sam- 

 ,ples in the newer one were thickly covered on the sides and top 



with what is chemically known as phenolate. Either phenol, a 

 volatile gas, or acetic acid in combination with carbonic-acid gas . 

 will attack lead and reduce it to a carbonate. If no acetic acid is 

 present in the wood, and the phenol be evaporated by some means 

 or another, there should be no more damage done to lead cables in 

 creosoted troughs than if they were run in conduits of other mate- 

 rials ; but means should be taken to freely ventilate the troughs, 

 not. only to protect the cables, but also to guard against accumula- 

 tions of explosive gas. Under these conditions, plain lead sheath- 

 ing would prove as efficient as that made of the tin alloy, the 

 durability of which latter covering can hardly be accepted as 

 assured. 



Lightning on War-Vessels. — Apart from the modern 

 vessels being protected by their construction, or by special provis- 

 ions for the purpose, the London Electrical Review asserts that 

 lightning does not play as destructive a part as it did forty or fifty 

 years ago, as even those ships unprovided with conductors have 

 suffered less damage than a smaller number of ships experienced 

 formerly ; not that modern vessels are exempt, but they seem to be 

 struck in a manner which causes fewer fatal accidents, and in some 

 cases even the effects of a lightning flash have borne so little trace 

 of their origin that they have been credited to the wilful act of 

 some one on board. 



HEALTH MATTERS. 

 The Pathological Bearings of Heredity. 



Animals, including man, have arrived at their present state of 

 development by the combined but rival forces of heredity and evo- 

 lution, the latter term including the effects of surrounding environ- 

 ment. Evolution without heredity, as Ribot observes, would render 

 every change transitory ; and every modification, whether beneficial 

 or not, would disappear with the individual. The results of hered- 

 ity without evolution, on the other hand, would give us the monoto- 

 nous conservation of the same types fixed once and for all. With 

 heredity and evolution we have life and variation. Evolution pro- 

 duces physiological and psychological modifications, habit fixes 

 these in the individual, and heredity fixes them in the race. These 

 aphorisms, says The Medical Press, apply as well to diseased con- 

 ditions as to health, and, in endeavoring to unravel the mysterious 

 bearings of heredity upon disease, we have to bear in mind the con- 

 flicting influence of stability with this tendency to variation. The 

 operation of hereditary tendencies is perpetually disturbed by in- 

 numerable circumstances unappreciable by our means of observa- 

 tion, but capable nevertheless of producing varieties infinite alike in 

 extent and degree. 



It is well knowri that sensitiveness, whether to general or special 

 impressions, varies extremely in different individuals. An opera- 

 tion which involves pain amounting to agony to one person will be 

 borne by another with comparative indifference ; and the tissues of 

 one person will re-act to stimuli to such an extent as to cause vio- 

 lent inflammation, while those of another prove quite passive under 

 similar circumstances. It is this varying irritability which explains 

 the fact that no two cases are exactly alike of the same disease. 

 These differences are distinctly transmissible from parent to off- 

 spring ; and, when the inherited quality is a tendency on the part 

 of certain tissues to re-act more readily than normal to morbid in- 

 fluences, we say that a person has a diathesis. What we term, for 

 the want of a better word, idiosyncrasy, is in reality a diathesis or 

 part of a diathesis, — a peculiar susceptibility of the individual to 

 re-act unduly, either in excess or otherwise, to certain stimuli. 

 Idiosyncrasies may be transmitted, as they very frequently are ; but 

 they are in any case congenital. These peculiarities of tissue and 

 function often remain latent until some morbid process emphasizes 

 the fact that a particular proclivity exists in the individual. This 

 point cannot be better illustrated than by quoting the well-known 

 story, that, of several hunters who were thrown at the same time 

 into the same stream of water, no two were affected alike. In one 

 an attack of rheumatism marks the tendency of joint-tissues to 

 take on a certain process of inflammation, in another an attack of 

 inflammation of the lungs points out the pulmonaiy apparatus as 

 the organ least endowed with powers of resistance, while a third 



