244 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. X. No. 250' 



ally — not on public grounds, but for the purely selfish purpose of 

 avoiding expensive accidents (that is, in self-preservation) — by the 

 railways of the United States, in premiums for new inventions, in 

 training-schools and shops for the education of its servants and the 

 development of improvements, for the purchase of the latest devices 

 for the saving of life and property, he will find his command of fig- 

 ures taxed to express the aggregate result. And if he will remem- 

 ber the number of courts and lawyers in this great country of ours, 

 and the general gusto with which juries mulct railway-companies, he 

 will not wonder, I think, that science cannot move fast enough in 

 devising improvements to be utilized in the physical management 

 of railways. The presumptive margin of profit in railway-operation 

 is small enough as it is; but when the recurrence of such accidents 

 as those at Republic, at White River, at Forest Hills, at Chatsworth, 

 and at Kout's Station are admitted into the forecast, it is apt to 

 produce a rather considerable shrinkage in the prospect, or in the 

 temptation of stockholders to build more railroads. 



Congress has lately established a bureau at Washington for the 

 filing of railway-schedules, and for discovering what, if any, ' long 

 hauls ' and ' short hauls ' can possibly be " under substantially sim- 

 ilar circumstances and conditions." What public benefit this 

 bureau may become to the public, it remains to be demonstrated. 

 But, if the establishment of another bureau or commission to devise 

 a means for supplying railway-companies with infallible employees 

 were contemplated by the government, the government's good in- 

 tentions, at least, could not well be questioned. Of the three mil- 

 lions of railway-employees in this nation, the percentage who do not 

 do their duty is too microscopical for expression in decimals ; but 

 the railway-industry happens to be one in which an invisible per- 

 centage of carelessness produces enormously visible calamitous re- 

 sults ; that is the price we pay for being carried back and forth to 

 our business at five miles in ten minutes instead of five miles in an 

 hour. But before the absolutely infallible employee is found, some 

 eminent counsel of a railway-company may yet be bold enough to 

 claim, that, since railroad-companies cannot take their brakemen 

 and track-walkers from the class of the community which produces 

 Sumners, Websters, and Conklings, the unknown mental processes 

 which sometimes lead a brakeman or a track-walker, from causes 

 entirely and subjectively mental, to happen to think of something 

 else than his routine duty, ought to discharge a corporation which 

 has no soul — if not from pecuniary damages for loss of life, limb, 

 or property it has no agency in procuring, at least from newspaper 

 declamation, and charges of sacrificing its passengers and patrons 

 to mere 'greed.' Since, however we may explain it, it happens to 

 be one of the most persistent of truths that accidents are of more 

 frequent occurrence upon bankrupt or non-dividend paying than 

 upon solvent and dividend paying railroads, one might say, logi- 

 cally speaking, that the ' greed ' of a railway-company was a public 

 security rather than a danger. 



There is an apparent moral to be drawn from these records of 

 casualty, which, from one point of view, perhaps, is safe enough. 

 We may say, and say with great truth, that no achievement of ap- 

 plied science can be substituted for human watchfulness and care, 

 but only for human skill. But to this there would be exceptions. 

 The automatic hay-press, which rams and packs and binds not 

 only, but debouches the completed ball in time to pack another in 

 the place from which that ball is debouched ; the Hoe printing- 

 press, which counts the sheets it prints ; and hundreds of others, — 

 are watchfulness personified (and I am told that there are mechanics 

 employed in the most delicate processes of watch-making which 

 are said even to correct a chance misplacement of the material to 

 be worked upon) ; but, since the operation of none of these is occu- 

 pied with the transportation of human beings, should these autom- 

 ata fail, no lives are lost, and no public outcry awakened. The 

 better statement is, I think, that no machine can counteract human 

 wilfulness or neglect. The machine can only do the share of work 

 allotted it. If the man fails in his, no accuracy of invention can 

 suffice. A dial may register the failure of a watchman to visit a 

 certain point so many times a night, and tell its unalterable tale in 

 the morning. But, where a train of human freight rushes on to 

 death and disaster, death and disaster tell the tale, upon the instant 

 of the dereliction, and when it is too late to correct the fault or 

 supply the omission. And the public scarifies with its denuncia- 



tion the owners of the machine, and not the man or men who 

 ought to have cleared its track but did not. 



Everybody must trust somebody, corporations must trust every- 

 body they employ : nay, more, the railway-company must not only 

 trust everybody, but it is at the mercy of every track-walker on its^ 

 line ; and, worse than that, every passenger that a railway transports, 

 every pound of freight it moves, is at his mercy too. Should that 

 track-walker's eye be turned from an obstruction or overlook a de- 

 tail, the eternal vigilance of every other servant of the company is 

 worse than useless. The crash must come, and all the sooner be- 

 cause the machinery which moves the train is of the latest and best, 

 and the coaches the completest and most luxurious, that human in- 

 genuity has devised. Penalties, threats, the prospect of rewards, 

 alike fail to make the man do his duty, or to prevent his forgetful- 

 ness or wilful absence of mind or body at a crucial point, or the 

 intellectual hiatus of a moment which causes his hand to forget 

 once in a half a million of times the required act which it is quite his 

 second nature to do at all the other times. What is it ? Is it an 

 ' Act of God ? ' Is it inevitable necessity, or is it Nemesis ? 



The physical perils of the sea appear to have been already over- 

 come. But the peril of panic remains, that no human ingenuity 

 can prevent, and no human discipline, however it may foresee, con- 

 trol. The wheelsman of the ' Ville de Havre ' had watched a ves- 

 sel steering towards them for hours in a clear night ; but when that 

 vessel was about to crush the great steamer, the very thought of 

 the monumental magnitude of the approaching peril paralyzed that 

 wheelsman's brain, and the brain-paralysis steeled his hand, and he 

 could not turn his wheel the few points that meant safety to a 

 priceless human freight. What is there to provide against here ?' 

 Shall we still preserve the antique phrase ' Act of God,' or merely 

 say that it is fate or luck ? Call it what we will, there is yet, it 

 would seem, an element in all mundane affairs for which nothing 

 human can invent an antidote or remedy, and which possibly 

 should relieve us, under our human laws, of the responsibility. 

 Whether or not mere human framers of human laws ever devise a 

 statute for the emergency, of one thing, however, we can, I think, 

 be sure enough ; namely, if a relief from this ' Act of God ' should 

 ever come, it will be because science, and not the reporters, nor yet 

 the leader-writers of our daily newspapers, have grappled with the- 

 problem. Every thing except the human brain, the human brain 

 appears to have conquered or to be in a fair way to conquer. But 

 to go outside of itself to control itself — that, it seems, so far, to 

 have been unable to do. Appleton Morgan. 



SOUND-BLINDNESS. 



The phenomena of color-blindness are well known, and have 

 been carefully investigated. We know that some persons can see- 

 to great distances, discern minute objects, enjoy works of art, and 

 yet are unable to distinguish certain colors. Physiologists, and 

 especially psychologists, have also found that there is a similar 

 series of phenomena to be observed in connection with the sense of 

 hearing. If a word were coined to describe these phenomena, it 

 would naturally be ' sound-deafness,' but many who have written 

 on this subject seem to prefer the term ' sound-blindness.' 



A writer in the London Journal of Education uses the term 

 ' sound-blindness,' and seems to have come to the subject from a 

 pedagogic standpoint. He states that the difficulties which some 

 persons have in learning to spell and in learning how to pronounce 

 foreign languages suggested to him the possibility of the existence 

 of such a thing as sound-blindness, — an inability to distinguish 

 particular shades of sound, arising from some organic defect in the 

 ear which is distinct from deafness, as that term is commonly un- 

 derstood. 



The writer in question noticed that a small boy, in writing down 

 a line of poetry which he had learned by heart, had spelled the 

 word 'very' ' voght.' When some experiments were tried, it was 

 found that the boy could hear no difference between ' very,' ' perry,' 

 and 'poUy,' and yet he was not deaf. The boy in question had 

 great difficulty in learning to read, and, on inquiry being made, 

 many teachers were found who testified to the fact that it is quite 

 a common thing to meet with children who are very slow in learn- 

 ing to read precisely, because sounds, different to the teacher, were 

 not different to them. It was also found, that, when a class of" 



