SCIENCE 



FRIDAY, JULY 15, i{ 



The number of accidents which occurred on the 4th of July 

 ■of the present year was very great. In Boston, twenty-seven in- 

 dividuals applied for surgical aid at the City Hospital, and nine 

 beds are occupied by injured persons. At the Massachusetts 

 General Hospital the number is nearly as great. In New York and 

 In Brooklyn there were also very many casualties more. If a de- 

 scription could be given of all these injuries, the picture would be 

 an appaling one. One of the saddest sights \ve have ever seen was 

 that of a deaf-mute girl whose clothing took fire from a burning 

 pack of fire-crackers which she carried in her pocket. Her back 

 was so severely burned that she was compelled to lie upon her 

 face in bed, and take her nourishment from a vessel while lying in 

 this position. Three days after the receipt of the injury, she de- 

 veloped lockjaw, and died in twelve hours. It is to be hoped that 

 the time is not far distant when the present barbarous method of 

 celebrating Independence Day will be prohibited by law, and the 

 prohibition enforced. 



Dr. Samuel Sexton has contributed an article to the 

 Medical Record on the subject of boxing the ears. He has upon 

 his records fifty-one cases in which the ear has been injured by 

 blows of the open hand or fist. Of these, thirty-one were males, 

 and twenty females. Of the males, thirteen had been boxed upon 

 the right ear, thirteen upon the left, and three upon both ears. 

 One was kicked by a companion upon the left ear while bathing, 

 and the right ear of another was injured by having the head 

 violently squeezed between the hands of another person. Of the 

 females, fourteen were struck upon the left ear, and six upon the 

 right. Five of the women were assaulted by their husbands. Of 

 the entire number, eight were boxed in play, four by school- 

 teachers, two by parents, and one, a fervent lover, by his sweet- 

 heart. Several cases occurred among pugilists, and others were 

 due to assaults and brawls. The nature of the injuries varied to 

 a considerable degree. One had inflammation of the ear, with sus- 

 picion of intracranial trouble. He had had a running of the ear for 

 twelve years, following a blow upon that organ. This patient 

 subsequently died of brain disease. In another case the ear became 

 inflamed, and the hearing was very much impaired. In still 

 another, the patient was slapped by his father upon the left ear. 

 Immediate pain and deafness followed, with a bloody discharge 

 from the ear. It was three months before this case recovered. 

 The dangers to which Dr. Sexton calls attention are so grave, that 

 parents, teachers, and others should never punish those committed 

 to their charge by boxing the ear. 



DO WE WANT AN INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT 

 WITH ENGLAND? 

 The agitation for an international copyright with England was 

 at its topmost vigor just fifty years ago. It is going on to-day 

 with precisely the same vigor, promoted by the same interest, but- 

 tressed by the same arguments, as at its beginning. But meantime 

 the situation has changed. In 1837, when Henry Clay cham- 

 pioned a bill for an Anglo-American international copyright in the 

 Senate, all our publishing-houses printed English books without 

 going through the form of asking anybody's permission. All of 

 our magazines were ' cruisers,' using the matter they found in the 

 English monthlies and quarterlies with despotic freedom ; and the 

 question, ' Who reads an American book ? ' was answered with 

 practical unanimity by our own countrymen, ' Nobody.' 



To-day we are on the eve of another congressional effort for a 

 bill providing for an Anglo-American international copyright. But 

 what is now the situation ? Our publishing-houses publish English 

 books as fast as (and often earlier than) they appear in Great 

 Britain, either by purchasing advance sheets of the British pub- 

 lisher, or reprinting by license. And our magazines find plenty 

 of suitable material offered them at home not only, but quite 

 too much, and so rather discourage voluntary contributions at all, 

 preferring to invite contributions from parties chosen by their 

 editors. The exceptions to these propositions are insignificant ; 

 and, even were they larger, they would still be exceptions, from 

 which nothing but the rule can be argued. The only difference 

 between the agitation of to-day and the agitation of 1837 is, that 

 to-day we are told that the reform is desired because American 

 authors are suffering for it, and because the absence of an Anglo- 

 American copyright cheapens and discourages their work ; and that 

 it is therefore unpatriotic to further deny it. 



Do we want any more books than we have already? What 

 branch of science, or literature, or art, is suffering ? From what 

 quarter comes complaint of a dearth of books ? Courts are estab- 

 lished for the trial of controversies between man and man. Were 

 there no litigation, there would be no courts. And yet one of the 

 horn-book and capital maxims of court is, that ' it is to the interest 

 of the public that there should be an end of litigation,' — a maxim 

 which is interpreted to mean that compromises and quietings of 

 actions between parties (statutes of limitation, or any discretion of a 

 court tending to discontinuances of lawsuits) will always be en- 

 couraged. Are we not coming to the time when there will be 

 some such a paraphrase of this maxim as that ' it is to the interest 

 of literature that there shall be an end to books ' ? Certainly the 

 groaning columns of our book-stores begin to bewilder us with 

 their profusion of literary wares, and suggest a question as to how 

 much of all this mass is, after all, literature. How much of it will 

 be on these shelves a year, or even a month, from now, or will have 

 been packed down in the cellars below, or turned over to the 

 paper-stock men in the Ann Streets of our great centres ? 



If it should prove, for example, to be the fact that a couple of 

 dozen men in the United States do all the writing for our American 

 magazines, whose business would it be, except that of the public, — 

 who buy those magazines or not, entirely as they please ? Maga- 

 zines are not edited, have not for the last ten years been edited, as 

 of old, by voluntary contributions. The editor knows what his 

 readers want, and writes to employ just what writers they want. 

 He saves his reading of manuscripts, thus conserving his eyesight 

 as well as his judgment. If some of our magazine-editors would 

 just once print some of the manuscript they do receive from volun- 

 tary correspondents, — just as they receive them, with the orthog- 

 raphy, etymology, syntax and prosody, punctuation, and so forth, 

 precisely as their authors send them, — I think our public would be 

 convinced that the editors are right in the policy they pursue. And 

 I do not suppose the magazine-purchasing public would ver>' 

 largely clamor for a second effort, on the editors' part, to ' recognize 

 voluntary contributors.' Add to this the fact that a large percent- 

 age of the voluntary contributors to our magazines, — convinced that 

 a conspiracy exists among all magazine-editors to reject their 

 manuscript, — 'get their blood up,' so to speak, and print at their own 

 expense in pamphlet or book form, and we derive some idea of the 

 causes which are at work to load down our booksellers' counters. 

 It seems to me that the world of readers will be more apt to ask 

 for a law which will restrict, rather than for one which will in- 

 crease, the publishing of books ; and that they would look less 

 askance at the proposal for an Anglo-American copyright law if 

 assured that it would curtail, rather than exaggerate, the present 

 deluge of printed and published matter. 



Another change in the situation since the early agitation for English 



