28 KANSAS CITY REVIEW. OF SCIENCE, 
ends. Learning to play on the piano, or other musical instrument, must attain to 
automatic quickness, to give that ease and readiness of execution which the nattfre 
of the process demands. The fundamental operations of arithmetic should be 
so thoroughly learned as to be largely automatic. When these fundamental pro- 
cesses of numbers have become organized, as it were, in the mental organism, the 
mind is then left free to attend to the logical processes involved in the mathemat- 
ical operations. But, for the reason that automatism is an expensive acquisition, 
it should be limited to such mental operations as necessarily demand it. Those 
operations which can be well performed by deliberate thought, should be left to the 
conscious control of the will. 
1. The education of the mental organism into automatic action should begin 
early, while the nervous system is plastic and impressible. 
2. One of the practical problems of education is to duly antagonize con- 
sciousness and automatism. 
3. The energies of childhood should not be utilized in the automatic de- 
mands of business, for this would bring on an arrested development of mind and 
body. 
4. The mental life of the school demands that provision should be made for 
the exercise of both these forms of mental action, the automatic and the con- 
scious. 
Rises: 
A TALK ABOUT LIGHTNING. 
F. W. CLARKE, PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTY, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI. 
A year or two ago a house not far from Cincinnati was struck by lightning, 
and its inmates were pretty well scared. Among them was quite an intelligent 
young lady, recently from school, who had studied a little about electricity, and 
knew that metals would attract the spark. The flash had fallen, the danger was 
over, but her panic remained; and in her fright she rushed eagerly down stairs in 
search of a pair of scissors with which to cut the steel buckles from her shoes. 
This act, comical as it seems in all its bearings, was yet based upon rational 
grounds. ‘To be sure it was like closing the stable door after the horse had been 
stolen; of course the young lady might simply have removed her shoes; and we 
all know, moreover, that lightning does not generally attack its victims’ feet first, 
unless, indeed, they happen to be sitting in what might be termed the bar-room 
attitude. Yet the fact remains that the wearing of metals during a thunder storm 
slightly increases the danger of the wearer. The metallic object has a determining 
influence upon the course of the flash. In one instance a lady’s bonnet, because 
