134 



SCIENCE. 



[VuL. XII. No. 294 



the death of Barttelot, who was murdered by his carriers. It has 

 not been stated how this news reached the coast, but, since the re- 

 estabhshment of intercourse with Stanley Falls, its authenticity 

 seems not improbable. The cable (London, Sept. 14) reports, "A 

 despatch from St. Paul de Loanda states that Major Barttelot was 

 shot on July 19 by his iVIanyema carriers. The head Arab and his 

 men thereupon ran off to Stanley Falls, where Jamieson is making 

 arrangements with Tippo-Tip for the organization of an expedition. 

 He will proceed as quickly as possible. The London newspapers 

 are unanimously of the opinion that Major Barttelot was betrayed 

 by Tippo-Tip, who organized the native portion of the expedition ; 

 and the question is asked. Why may not Stanley have been also the 

 victim of his treachery ? Nyangwe, the home of Tippo-Tip, is three 

 hundred miles distant from Stanley Falls. The first despatch said 

 that Tippo-Tip was at Nyangwe. The second does not indicate 

 whether he is still there, or has returned to Stanley Falls. Colonel 

 De Winton is of the opinion that Barttelot was murdered between 

 the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth degrees of east longitude at 

 about the second degree of north latitude. The Manyenia twice 

 attempted to take Livingstone's life. The second despatch removes 

 from the Arabs the suspicion of treachery." 



All the evidence tends to show that there is no intention on the 

 part of Tippo-Tip to betray Stanley. Furthermore, it must be 

 borne in mind that Barttelot at an early date had an encounter 

 with natives of the same tribe, in which several of Tippo-Tip's 

 men were killed. It seems that he was almost too energetic in his 

 dealings with the natives. 



A despatch dated London, Sept. 16, says, "Captain Vangele, 

 who has just returned to Europe from the Kongo country, says he 

 is convinced of Tippo-Tip's innocence of the murder of Major 

 Barttelot. Tippo-Tip, he says, is engaged entirely in commerce, 

 and had an interest in the success of Major Barltelot's expedition. 

 The porters who accompanied the expedition were furnished by 

 Tippo-Tip. They agreed that they should be paid on reaching 

 Zanzibar, and to this fact Captain 'Vangele partly attributes the 

 murder, because the payment of the porters depended upon the 

 success. of the journey. He thinks the strict discipline preserved 

 by Barttelot may also have aroused hostility. He believes that 

 Jamieson will find, it difficult to organize a new expedition. Cap- 

 tain Vangele is convinced that Stanley is safe." 



It is not quite clear to us whether ' "Vangele ' is the same "Van 

 Gele who left Leopoldville on April 26 to occupy Stanley Falls. 

 His return to Europe at this time seems hardly probable, although 

 we do not know what has been going on on the upper Kongo 

 during the last months. 



Meanwhile committees are forming in various countries for the 

 relief of Emin, or rather for supplying Emin with ammunition and 

 opening a route to his province. Foremost in these endeavors is 

 at present the German East African Association, but so far no 

 definite results have been obtained. 



MEDICAL MUSEUMS. 



The Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons closed its 

 meeting in Washington last evening with an address in the National 

 Museum from the president, Dr. John S. Billings, and a reception 

 in the Army Medical Museum. Dr. Billings's audience was a large 

 and appreciative one ; and he made his address on medical muse- 

 ums, with special reference to the Army Medical Museum at Wash- 

 ington, exceedingly interesting as well as instructive and sugges- 

 tive. 



The necessity of economizing space prevents the reproduction 

 here of the very interesting historical enumeration of the leading 

 medical museums of the world, with which Dr. Billings opened his 

 address, and we pass at once to the central topic, condensing as the 

 exigencies of space demand. He said : — 



" This collection, known as the Army Medical Museum, owes its 

 inception to Dr. William A. Hammond, one of whose first acts 

 after becoming surgeon-general, in 1862, was to issue a circular 

 stating, that, ' as it is proposed to establish in Washington an 

 army medical museum, medical officers are directed diligently to 

 collect, and to forward to the office of the surgeon-general, all speci- 

 mens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be re- 



garded as valuable, together with projectiles and foreign bodies re- 

 moved, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the 

 study of military medicine or surgery.' By the end of the year, 

 over a thousand specimens had been collected, and the catalogue 

 printed in 1866 showed that it contained 7,716 specimens. It is 

 not my purpose in this address to trace the history of its develop- 

 ment : that must be done elsewhere. It has recently been placed, 

 with the library, in a conveniently arranged fire-proof building, and 

 on the 1st of July last contained over 15,000 specimens besides 

 those contained in its microscopical department, divided as fol- 

 lows : — 



Comparative anatomy i,68g 



Pathological 8,354 



Medals 3S4 



Microscopical specimens 0,416 



Normal human anatomy 2,961 



Instruments and apparatus 814 



Microscopes 141 



Miscellaneous 835 



" Besides these, there are 375 specimens pertaining to normal 

 human anatomy, and 726 to pathological anatomy, which are in 

 what is called the ' provisional series.' 



"At first the Army Medical Museum was limited to military 

 medical subjects ; but of late years its scope has been greatly 

 broadened, and is now nearly the same as that of the Royal Col- 

 lege of Surgeons. It includes human anatomy, physiology, pathol- 

 ogy, somatological anthropology, instruments and apparatus, and 

 illustrations of methods of teaching connected with special depart- 

 ments of practical medicine. It does not at present include hygiene 

 or materia medica, except in their immediate relations to the mili- 

 tary medical service ; and this for reasons which will be stated 

 presently. That our National Medical Museum should be broad 

 and comprehensive in its scope, there can be no doubt, its require- 

 ments in this respect being quite different from those of collections 

 formed and used more especially for the purpose of teaching medi- 

 cal students. The most practically valuable of these last are those 

 formed by individual professors to suit their own specialties and 

 methods of teaching. They need not, as a rule, be large. I may 

 even say that they should not be large ; for the labor of properly 

 preserving a large collection is great, and the student, with his 

 limited time and want of knowledge of what to look for, can ex- 

 amine but few specimens so as to profit by them. For the same 

 reason specimens of rare abnormities, of double monstrosities, etc., 

 are of little use in ordinary medical teaching as given in this 

 country, and are not specially desirable in the museums of our 

 medical schools. 



" You may have noticed, that, in speaking of the scope of our 

 museum, I said it included ' human anatomy.' This phrase does 

 not mean that it has no specimens illustrating the structure of other 

 animals, for it has many, and needs many more ; but it means that 

 in this department its main purpose is not to make comparative 

 anatomy an end to itself by exhibiting all known variations in 

 structure throughout the animal kingdom as a basis for their study 

 in relation to development and environment, causation and results : 

 in other words, it is not an anatomical museum, but a medical 

 museum. The broad field of general biology, including natural 

 history and comparative anatomy, will ultimately be covered by the 

 National .Museum ; and in our medical collection it will be quite 

 enough to illustrate human anatomy fully, using so much of the 

 structure of the lower animals as will be useful in explaining why 

 certain parts of the human body are thus and so, and not other- 

 wise. No sharp line of distinction can'be drawn between the field 

 of work of the general and that of the medical museum. So far as 

 morphology is concerned, they must necessarily overlap somewhat, 

 since both want a certain number of the same specimens, although 

 using them to illustrate different points of view. 



" The kind of specimens most valued for illustrating anatomy in 

 a museum is now very different from what was sought for in the 

 first half of this century. Dried and varnished dissections showing 

 blood-vessels, etc., are now looked on as nearly useless, and are 

 kept only as historical relics. Elaborate dissections under alcohol, 

 mounted in opaque dishes with flat glass covers, and sections of 

 frozen bodies similarly mounted, are what the student and the 

 practitioner most desire to see. In our museum there are some ex- 



