SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY. 61 



The medical philosopher, Asclepiades, Pliny tells us, had found that health 

 could be preserved, and if lost, restored, by physical exercise alone, and not only 

 discarded the use of internal remedies, but made public declaration that he would 

 forfeit all claim to the title of a physician if he should ever fall sick or die but by 

 violence or extreme old age. Asclepiades kept his word, for he lived upward of 

 a century and died from the effects of an accident. He used to prescribe a 

 course of gymnastics for every form of bodily ailment, and the same physic might 

 be successfully applied to certain moral disorders, incontinence, for instance, and 

 the incipient stages of the alcohol habit. It would be a remedy ad principium, 

 curing the symptoms by removing the c luse, for some of the besetting vices of 

 youth can with certainty be ascribed to an excess of that potential energy which 

 finds no outlet in the functions of our sedentary mode of life. In large cities 

 parents owe their children a provision for a frequent opportunity of active exercise, 

 as they owe them antiseptic diet in a jnalarious climate. — By Dr. Felix L. Oswald, 

 in Popular Science Monthly for May. 



Trouve's utilization of electricity in combination with surgical instruments is 

 bearing fruit. A case is reported from Vienna in which a doctor has succeeded 

 in curing a cancer in the stomach mainly through the assistance rendered by the 

 polyscope in illuminating the cavity of the stomach. The electric probe, which 

 rings a bell when a ball or any metalHc substance imbedded in the muscle is 

 reached, is found a valuable acquisition by army surgeons, and an application of 

 the same principle to surgical forceps has enabled a Berlin oculist to save a 

 mechanic's eye, which had received a bit of steel. The case had become so 

 urgent that the eye must be lost unless the piece of metal could be extracted 

 without delay, but Dr. Hirshberg, by inserting a soft iron probe and subsequently 

 converting it into a magnet by passing an electric current through it, withdrew 

 the metallic particle, and saved the eye. 



A curious experiment in heat is performed with an apparatus devised by Dr. 

 Grassi. The apparatus consists of three concentric vessels separated by annular 

 spaces about three-fourths of an inch. The outer space is filled with oil, and the 

 inner with water. The oil is heated to a point above 212° Fahrenheit, when the 

 water begins to boil. Oil heated to 300° is then introduced into the central ves- 

 sel, and falls rapidly to a temperature about that of the boiling water. Dr. Grassi 

 finds that this central oil cools the more quickly the greater the heat of the outer 

 ring of oil — a result seemingly very paradoxical. 



