September 30, 1887.] 



SCIENCE. 



163 



eating-houses have fallen off, and a tendency to go back to the 

 private shops has manifested itself. 



There are numerous co-operative building-societies in Sweden, 

 but the system has not been extended to agriculture, nor, to any 

 considerable extent, to fishing. 



MENTAL SCIENCE. 



Healing Wounds by Mental Impressions. 



Professor Delboeuf of Liige is certainly the most versatile 

 of living investigators, when one considers the great originality and 

 suggestiveness of all the work he does. Ancient and modern lan- 

 guages, logic, general physics and physiology, and especially ex- 

 perimental psychology, have received his attention by turns. His 

 latest contribution is to therapeutics, and is a communication made 

 on June 4 to the Belgian Academy, which will probably turn out 

 to be of the greatest theoretical as well as practical importance. 



We all are familiar with accounts of the wounds inflicted on 

 themselves by African dervishes ; but the statement which the nar- 

 rators always make, that the wounds do not inflame, or may even 

 be quite healed in twenty-four hours, probably often tends to dis- 

 credit their whole description in the reader's mind. Delboeuf's ob- 

 servations now make these stories wholly plausible. It is well es- 

 tablished that in certain hypnotic subjects a suggestion made during 

 trance, that to a part of their body a cautery or a blister is ap- 

 plied, will produce, after due lapse of time, an actual vesication of 

 the skin. The hallucinatory feeling of inflammation produces in 

 these persons a genuine inflammation. M. Delboeuf argued from 

 this, that the feeling of pain, however useful in other respects, must 

 itself be an inflammatory irritant, and went on to infer that the 

 abolition of it from an actual wound ought to accelerate its healing. 

 He immediately thought of some hypnotic subjects whom he had 

 made anesthetic, and in whom he had often admired the rapidity 

 with which the marks of punctures and pinchings disappeared, and 

 proceeded to more systematic experiments, which, so far as they go, 

 seem to verify his hypothesis perfectly. On a young woman whom he 

 could make insensible by suggestion, he marked two corresponding 

 spots, one on each arm, and made on each an identical burn with 

 the hot iron, announcing to the patient that the one on the right 

 should not be felt. The suggestion took effect ; and the next day, 

 when the bandages were taken off, and the left arm presented 

 a vesicled sore with an inflammatory area three centimetres in 

 diameter, the right arm showed only a clean scorch of the skin of 

 the exact size of the iron (8 millimetres diameter), without redness 

 or inflammation. On another subject similar results were obtained 

 with burns and blisters, the spots chosen being near together on 

 the sa'me arm or on the neck. The experiments are few in number, 

 and ought to be multiplied ; but the reader will immediately see the 

 vista which they open. Many of the results of the ' mind-cure,' and 

 the strange fact, so long known, of opium controlling inflamma- 

 tions, are explained by M. Delboeuf's principle. So is the popular 

 belief in ' hardening ' one's self by a little judicious indifference, and 

 neglect of one's condition. Local pain is useful in leading us to 

 protect the wounded part from mechanical abrasion, — several of 

 M. Delboeuf's experiments were inconclusive, because the subjects, 

 being insensible at the seat of their injuries, allowed them to get 

 scraped, etc., — but it has the drawback of exciting reflex changes 

 of nutrition of an unfavorable kind. Anaesthetizing a wound pre- 

 vents these reflex changes. M. Delboeuf, suggesting to a very 

 sensitive subject that she should not feel a severe dental operation, 

 was assured by the dentist that what he found most e.^traordinary 

 in the whole performance was the absence of the salivary secretion 

 which would usually have accompanied it. 



It is to be hoped that others, with better facilities for surgical 

 experimentation than a professor of classical literature like M. Del- 

 boeuf, will follow the example he has so happily set them. 



BOOK -REVIEWS. 

 Technical School and College Bicildings, By Ed ward C. ROBINS, 

 F.S.A. New York, Van Nostrand. 4°. 

 This handsome volume by a gentleman who holds a most hon- 

 orable position among architects and^f riends of technical education, 

 is inscribed to Professor Huxley. It is a treatise on the design and 



construction of applied-science and art buildings, together with 

 a description of their suitable fittings and sanitation. Its value will 

 be apparent at once to every one, but especially to those professors 

 and instructors who desire to utilize the results of the best Euro- 

 pean experience in their laboratories, museums, and lecture-rooms. 

 Our medical and educational readers will recall the pains taken by 

 the trustees of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to obtain the 

 benefit of the best thought and ripest experience of the world in 

 relation to their work, and will readily understand how a book of 

 this scope relating to hospitals would have lightened their labors. 



In this country we are now passing rapidly forward in the con- 

 struction of school-buildings and laboratories, and, whether they 

 are large or small, our desire is to have them as complete as 

 possible. It is here that European experience is so valuable, and 

 Mr. Robins has done us a great service in putting into a readable 

 form accounts of what has been done in the great schools, and uni- 

 versities of Europe. His book contains full descriptions of such 

 famous institutions as the Bonn, Berlin, and Munich Chemical 

 Laboratories, Du Bois-Reymond's Physiological Institute at Berlin, 

 the laboratories of the Royal Trade School at Chemnitz, the Wiirz- 

 burg Physical Institute, the Royal Technical School at Stockholm, 

 the laboratories at Charlottenburg, Zurich, Paris, and Strasburg. 

 Most of these are accompanied with cuts and diagrams, so that 

 their interior arrangements may be studied in minutest detail. 

 Following these come full descriptions of the laboratories at 

 South Kensington, Finsbury, Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Hud- 

 dersfield, Oxford, Cambridge, and other English cities. The 

 chapters which follow on the fittings of these buildings are in one 

 sense the most valuable of all ; for they give us the most detailed 

 information concerning the hundred and one minor things which 

 go to make up the perfect laboratory. They discuss and describe, 

 for example, the working-benches, demonstration-tables, drawing- 

 rooms, and so on. The heating, ventilation, and sanitation of ap- 

 plied-science buildings are also elaborately treated and profusely 

 illustrated. An appendix gives statistics as to the technical schools 

 in Great Britain, and we find there particulars as to the area occu- 

 pied by the buildings, their cubical contents, the cost of land, cost 

 of fittings, annual expense of maintenance, number of students, and 

 so forth. 



Mr. Robins's book is one which our investigators in physics, chem- 

 istry, and biology, our university architects, and our technical edu- 

 cators, cannot do without. 



The Natural History of Thought, in its Practical Aspect from 

 its Origin z'« Infancy. By GEORGE Wall. London, Triib- 

 ner. 8°. 



This volume is in many ways a serious disappointment. Much 

 of this effect is due to the fact that the expectations raised by the 

 inviting titlepage are not in the least realized. Had these pages 

 appeared with a less ambitious title, one could have judged them 

 much more leniently than it is possible to do when considering them 

 as an attempt to write a life-history of the thinking process ; and 

 this failure is made a hundred-fold more striking by the considera- 

 tion that science is in a far better position to deal with this problem 

 than ever before. At no very distant date it will be possible to 

 write a natural history of thought that shall be regarded as an il- 

 lustrious consummation of a most important movement, — the ap- 

 plication (as the term ' natural historj' ' suggests) of the biological 

 point of view to the consideration of mental phenomena. Even now 

 a master-hand could sketch the outlines of such a comprehensive 

 undertaking. To blame Mr. Wall for hot being such a master- 

 hand would be very unjust ; but the same cannot be said when 

 fault is found with his lack of appreciation of the complexity of the 

 problem before him, and the important light which recent experi- 

 mentally discovered facts have shed upon it. The natural history 

 of thought can be far better gleaned from such a volume as Mr. 

 Tylor's ' Primitive Culture,' or (to make the comparison more im- 

 mediate) from M. Perez's ' The First Three Years of Childhood,' 

 than from the pages of Mr. Wall's book. 



The volume is really a collection of educational essays, written 

 by an observant thinker, deeply imbued with the high pedagogical 

 value of moral training, and in particular with that portion of it 

 usually termed ' religious,' and appreciating here and there the 



