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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
Bartlett. The State of Connecticut appropriated five thousand dollars 
towards the monument, and the city of Hartford an equal amount. The 
expenses of the pedestal of the statue, which should also be of bronze, are 
not met by these appropriations, and funds are solicited of the public by the 
committee of the Hartford Medical Society, of whom Dr. E. H. Hunt, of 
Hartford, is chairman, and Dr. G. W. Russell, of the same city, treasurer. 
Dr. Wells “was the world’s benefactor.” 
Value of Atropine in Opium Poisoning. — The “Lancet” of July 24 says 
that in a report of the Chinese Hospital at Shanghai, recently published, 
we find that the medical officer of the institution, Dr. Johnston, speaks 
almost rapturously of the value of the subcutaneous injection of atropine in 
opium-poisoning. During the last ten years upwards of 500 such cases of 
poisoning (nearly all suicidal) have come under his own observation, sixty- 
two having been recorded last year. Many of the most desperate cases 
rallied and recovered under the treatment advocated. The loss of life 
annually in China from the abuse of the drug must be appalling. Opium- 
smokers to the number of 360 were treated in the hospital in 1874, but the 
experience and results obtained were not encouraging, and Dr. Johnson ex- 
presses his opinion that it is a hopeless task to reclaim the confirmed opium- 
smoker. 
Influence of Feeding over Development of Body. — In the course of his 
address to the British Association on Anthropology, Dr. Rollestone, F.R.S., 
made some interesting observations on this subject. Putting aside specula- 
tion, he said we placed our feet on firm ground when we say that in all 
savage communities the chiefs have a larger share of food and other com- 
forts, such as there are in savage life, and have consequently better and 
larger frames — or, as the Rev. S. Whitmee puts it, when observing on the 
fact as noticed by him in Polynesia, a more “ portly bearing.” This (which, 
as the size of the brain increases within certain proportions with the increase 
of the size of the body, is a material fact in every sense) has been testified 
to by a multitude of other observers, and is, to my mind, one of the most 
distinctive marks of savagery as opposed to civilisation. It is only in times 
of civilisation that men of the puny stature of Ulysses or Agesilaus are 
allowed their proper place in the management of affairs. And men of such 
physical size, coupled with such mental calibre, may take comfort, if they 
need it, from the purely quantitative consideration, that large as are the 
individual skulls from prehistoric graves, and high, too, as is the average 
obtained from a number of them, it has nevertheless not been shown that 
the largest individual skulls of those days were larger than, or, indeed, as 
large as the best skulls of our own days ; whilst the high average capacity 
which the former series shows is readily explicable by the very obvious 
consideration that the poorer specimens of humanity, if allowed to live at 
all in those days, were, at any rate, when dead not allowed sepulture in the 
“ tombs of the kings,” from which nearly exclusively we obtain our pre- 
historic crania. M. Broca has given us yet further ground for retaining our 
self-complacency by showing, from his extensive series of measurements of 
the crania from successive epochs in Parisian burial-places, that the average 
capacity has gone on steadily increasing. 
