1895.] Editor’s Table. 827 
In universities, the graduate courses should be open equally to both 
sexes, since those who seek them are mature and stand on an equal 
ooting. 
—EXPERIENCE of the effects of electrical currents on the human 
body does not sustain the New York method of executing criminals by 
electric shocks as either effective of humane. We have. so far, failed 
to find an electrician who can describe the course of an electric current 
after it enters the human body. Experience has abundantly shown 
that some men may tolerate currents of much higher voltage than 
others, so that there is no fixed standard of fatal efficiency. It is not 
certain that persons apparently killed by such currents are really dead, 
for there are cases of resuscitation from shocks of a strength which the 
New York executioners suppose to be fatal. The offer of experts to 
rescusitate the victims of the electric chair have been declined by the 
New York authorities. The testimony of some persons who have been 
resuscitated from apparent death by electricity, is that while all their 
motor functions were suspended, their consciousness was active. There 
may then be some truth in the assertion that the real execution under 
the New York law takes place at the autopsy. We cannot but regard 
the enterprise of the authors of this law as premature, and as involv- 
ing a trifling with unknown conditions, which is barbarous. The law 
should be repealed. As a substitute for this and all other forms of 
execution, the guillotine has everything in its favor. 
Our hopes of the benefits to science to be derived from the Field 
Museum of Chicago have not been realized. Nearly all of the scien- 
tific men who originally obtained positions there, have left it with ex- 
pressions of dissatisfaction. This was to have been expected as a con- 
sequence of the organization which Mr. Field permitted. The most 
active member of the management was a successful lumber merchant, 
and the appointee as director was of an equally impossible stamp. Amer- 
icans sometimes wonder why European Museums of Natural History 
are so much superior to our own. The answer is that in Europe com- 
petent scientific men manage them; in America they do not, with the 
sole exception of a museum which is connected with a university (Har. 
vard), and one in New York where exceptional sagacity holds the 
reins. Chicago begins, in this matter, at the bottom of the ladder, and 
we will live in hopes. Perhaps Mr. Field himself will some day come 
to the rescue, and insist that the director of the Museum shall be a 
scientific man of proved ability, and that the only function of the 
