384 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 357 



practice which exposes those who partake of the diseased meat to 

 such obvious risks of infection. 



Cooling of the Body by Spray. — Dr. S. Placzek, follow- 

 ing up some laboratory experiments by Preyer and Flashaar on the 

 effect of spraying a considerable part of the body surface of ani- 

 mals with cold water, has applied the spray for the purpose of re- 

 ducing febrile temperatures in human beings. In the case of a 

 man suffering from phthisis, whose temperature was high, he found, 

 that, by spraying about a pint of water at between 60° and 70° F. 

 over his body, the temperature fell to normal, and continued so for 

 several hours. Again, a similar method was satisfactorily applied 

 in the case of a girl with diphtheria. In the healthy human sub- 

 ject, according to the Lancet, the spray lowered the temperature 

 nearly two degrees, and, in animals which had been put into a 

 condition of septic pyrexia by injections of bacteria, the tempera- 

 ture was reduced to normal by the spray. By keeping healthy 

 guinea-pigs and rabbits some hours under spray, and using from 

 half a pint to a pint of water at the temperature of the room (44° 

 to 62°), the temperature of the animals fell several degrees. 



Death by Electricity. — At the meeting of the Medico- 

 Legal Society held in this city Nov. 20. Dr. Phillip E. Donlin, 

 deputy coroner, who read a paper on " The Pathology of Death by 

 Electricity," in the course of which he said, " The popular idea 

 that the electrical current passes along the nerves and produces 

 shock by conducting the current to the brain, is, as you know, fal- 

 lacious. Our knowledge of the great electrical conductive power 

 of water, and the experiments of Dr. Richardson, which show the 

 still greater electrical conductive power of blood, would lead one 

 to suppose — and, in fact, it is proved by the greater damage done 

 to the most vascular organs of the body — that the blood is the 

 great conductor of electricity; and that in all cases of exposure to 

 the electric current the blood is the first to suffer, and the nerve- 

 centres and cells the last. Unquestionably our knowledge of the 

 imaimer of death points out clearly, that, when death is not on the 

 i^moment produced by the shock of the current, it must be produced 

 i by the electric current's action (conducted by the blood) upon the 

 ganglia of the heart, causing spasm of the heart muscle, emptying 

 the ventricles, and abnormally forcibly propelling the charged and 

 fluid blood to the periphery, producing hypersmic ecchymosis in 

 ihe most vascular portions of the most vascular organs. Where 

 death is not instantaneous, it must be produced by disorgan- 

 ization of the blood, interference with the circulation causing 

 engorgement of some vital vascular organ. The lungs being 

 the most vascular, death usually results from asphyxia either 

 through the unoxygenated condition of the blood, or hyperaemia 

 .of these organs." In reply to a question as to the effect 

 'likely to be produced by the infliction of the death penalty 

 :by electricity. Dr. Donlin said that the immensity of the power of 

 the machines constructed was such that the purely mechanical re- 

 sult would occasion death. It was possible with, those appliances 

 to drive the current of electricity through the tissues with such 

 (power as to destroy them, though the amount of power to be em- 

 ployed was clearly within the control of the electrician. 



Is Colorado's Climate Changing.' — The inhabitants of 

 Denver are asking what is the meaning of the unusual snow-fall 

 and humidity of the past month. The newspapers of that city, as 

 we learn from Medical News, have expressed the opinion that 

 their climate is about to undergo a change, in consequence of sur- 

 face changes of " building up " and improving the State. The 

 present moist season has been especially disappointing to Eastern 

 people, who have journeyed to Denver to escape the humidity of 

 our seaboard winters. From a letter recently received, a few sen- 

 tences are quoted : " Snow has fallen each night and morning, but 

 ithe sun conquers by mid-day, making walking almost impossible. 

 As a usual thing, the inhabitants expect about ten days of inclem- 

 ent weather during winter and spring, and have not looked upon 

 the paving of streets and crossings as at all necessary. But they 

 are now aroused to remedy this condition. The snow-fall is said 

 by some to be already greater than the total for three ordinary 

 winters." The total fall at the Denver station, in October, was 

 2.1 1 inches, and is the only October since 1871 when 1.49 inches 

 have been exceeded, with the single exception of that of 1877, 



when 2.15 inches were registered. There have been but nine 

 cloudless days in the same month, while nineteen were partly 

 cloudy. The mean temperature has been somewhat above that of 

 the past decade. Fog — a condition hitherto almost unknown m 

 Colorado — occurred during five mornings in October. 



Care of the Teeth. — At the meeting in Berlin last spring, 

 of the German Association of American Dentists, the best means 

 of preserving the teeth were discussed, and Dr. Richter of Breslau 

 said, " We know that the whole method of correctly caring for 

 the teeth can be expressed in two words, brush, soap. In these 

 two things we have all that is needful for the preservation of the 

 teeth. All the preparations not containing soap are not to be rec- 

 ommended ; and if they contain soap, all other ingredients are 

 useless except for the purpose of making their taste agreeable. 

 Among the soaps, the white castile soap of the English market is 

 especially to be recommended. A shower of tooth preparation s has 

 been thrown on the market, but very few of which are to be rec- 

 ommended. Testing the composition of them, we find that about 

 90 per cent are not only unsuitable for their purpose, b ut that the 

 greater part are actually harmful. All the preparations containing 

 salicylic acid are, as the investigations of Fernier have shown, de- 

 structive of the teeth. He who will unceasingly preach to his 

 patients to brush their teeth carefully shortly before bedtime, as a 

 cleansing material to use castile soap, as a mouth wash a solution of 

 oil of peppermint in water, and to cleanse the spaces between the 

 teeth by careful use of a silken thread, will help them in preserv- 

 ing their teeth, and will win the gratitude and good words of the 

 public." 



The Digestibility of Boiled Milk. — Though the impor- 

 tance of sterilizing milk for bottle-fed infants in cities has been 

 proven beyond a doubt, the process seems to have some disadvan- 

 tages. In a recent number of the Zci/schrz/t fur phvsiologische 

 Chemie, Dr. Randnitz publishes some striking experiments on the 

 subject. He shows by analysis of the milk ingested, and of the 

 fseces and urine, that much less nitrogenous material is abstracted 

 from boiled than from unboiled milk. If 15.6 grams of nitrogen in 

 the form of unboiled milk were given to dogs for three days, analy- 

 sis showed that 9.4 per cent was stored in the tissues of the animal. 

 On the other hand, with the same amount of nitrogen in boiled 

 milk, but 5.7 per cent was assimilated. If these results are con- 

 firmed, it is evident that an infant must need a larger quantity of 

 sterilized than of raw milk. 



Artificial Food for Infants. — Dr. Escherich of Munich 

 gave a lecture in the pediatric section of the sixty-second meeting 

 of German naturalists and physicians at Heidelberg, advocating a 

 reform in the artificial feeding of infants. He bases his belief in 

 the necessity of such a reform on the errors produced by Biedert's 

 theory, which depends upon the difference between cow's milk and 

 normal human milk. Biedert's view was, as stated in the Lancet, 

 that all the troubles and diseases occurring in artificially fed infants 

 were due to the indigestion of the caseine of the cow's milk, causing 

 irritation of the mucous membrane of the bowels. He therefore 

 considered, that, if the latter were diluted so as to contain one per 

 cent only of caseine, the infant could not possibly take an injurious 

 quantity of this noxious substance. Dr. Escherich considers that 

 this theory, and the practice resulting from it, have gone far to pre- 

 vent due care being exercised as to much more important condi- 

 tions. Such are, according to the lecturer, germs and fermentation 

 in improperly kept cow's milk, the number of meals, and the quan- 

 tity of food given at a time in proportion to the capacity of the in- 

 fantile stomach, the total quantity of nutritious matter and its pro- 

 portion in the food, and finally the injurious effect which the water 

 which has been added to the food has on the digestion and the 

 metamorphosis of nutritious matter. Dr. Escherich holds it, above 

 all, necessary to return to physiological principles, and so to ap- 

 proximate artificial feeding as much as possible to the mother's 

 milk, as regards the absence of germs and the number and quanti- 

 ties of meals. The lecturer then pointed out that it is easy enough, 

 by sterilization of small quantities of milk according to Soxhlet's 

 plan, to comply at least theoretically with all these conditions, and 

 at the same time to limit the quantity of caseine so as to fulfil Bie- 

 dert's requirements. 



