EDITORIAL ARTICLES.

THE VELOCITY OF MIND.

FRENCH Scientific circles have been regarding with some interest the phenomenal exploits of one Jacques Inaudi, whose powers as a lightning-calculator seem to surpass those recorded of the calculating-boys of former days. The abnormal rapidity of Inaudi's mental operations has naturally attracted attention to certain questions of more or less interest connected with the timerelations of mental processes.

Inaudi possesses the wonderful gift of being able to solve arithmetical calculations with prodigious rapidity, and unlike some of his similarly-gifted predecessors, he appears able to give a reasonable explanation of the methods he employs; so that his case becomes especially suitable for investigation. When asked how he contrived to multiply instantaneously one long row of figures by another equally long, he explained that he multiplied from the left just as one usually multiplies one hundred by ten. When asked to name the day of the week a certain day would fall several years hence, he replied immediately though he employed a method that would take an ordinarily-minded individual several minutes to carry out.

To what is this abnormal rate of mental speed due. The employment of recognized methods of calculation negative any idea that the result is due an association of intuitional elements. Inaudi's processes are fundamentally empirical, and their apparent instantaneousness in reaching a result is simply due to abnormal mental speed. Not that an intuitional factor in arithmetical processes is less unthinkable than an innate tendency in favor of some particular mode of artistic expression. The mind of Mozart and Inaudi both suggest the same problem. The rapid association of the empirical elements of perception which constitute the factors of arithmetical processes is fundamentally analogous to the power of combining sound perceptions by representative symbols, and the actual psychology of the two acts is probably very similar.

Inaudi illustrates in an extreme degree, the common every-day fact, that great differences prevail in the velocity of individuals' perceptions. No two people take quite the same time to understand an interrogation; no two children are quite the same in quickness of perception. The Irishman is reputed quicker in his appreciation of a witticism than the Scotchman, although the latter may retaliate by a more rapidly correct estimate of the possibilities of interest semiannually compounded. The velocity simply differs in the order of thought.

Are we becoming more rapid-minded? Is education a process which conduces to permanent alteration in the velocity of perceptive and conceptive ideation? Probably the Brahmins of India present the best example of a class long-trained in intellectual habits, and while the Brahmins are manifestly elevated by mental superiority above other classes in India, they do not exhibit any distinct peculiarity in acuteness of perception, nor do they commonly produce minds of Inaudi's type. Inaudi himself claims no hereditary bias in favor of his strange gift; his father could neither read nor write. So that any such abnormal mental quality as his must be classed as a lusus naturæ, the key to the interpretation of which is as yet withheld.

EDITORIAL BREVITIES.

A PHYSIOLOGICAL STYPTIC.

It is rather curious that fibrin ferment, as one of the normal blood constituents of known agency in the production of coagulation, should not have been thought of before as a remedy for hæmorrhage. An English experimentalist, Dr. Wright, has recently conducted some highly successful experiments in the way of controlling bleeding. Recognizing that coagulability depended upon the fibrin ferment, and was also related to the amount of lime salts contained in the blood, Dr. Wright proceeded to prepare his styptic which is a solution of fibrin ferment with one per cent. of calcium chloride. Hæmorrhage proceeding from division of all the veins of a rabbit's neck was promptly controlled by gently swobbing the bleeding space with this solution. The possible uses of such a remedy as this, in hæmoptysis, placenta prævia, hæmatophilia, and other such conditions, may perhaps make this discovery an exceedingly beneficial one.

WAS IT HYDROPHOBIA?

THE medical profession is accustomed to finding all kinds of hysterical vagaries designated hydrophobia. Here is an unusual case. A lady traveling alone in one of the helpless compartments of an English railway train, was annoyed by a gentleman jumping into the train just as it was starting. He appeared, however, an inoffensive individual and soon settled himself down on his traveling rug for a siesta. The lady was shortly after surprised and alarmed to hear a dog bark. The fearful conviction came to her that, as no dog had jumped into the carriage, the man must be barking, and the horrible thought passed through her, "Hydrophobia! he will tear me to pieces." She remembered that she could stop the train by pulling the communication-cord, but before doing so thought she would take just one look at the man. She did so, and greatly to her surprise, found him fast asleep. "Was it hydrophobia," she asks, "or do men ever dream they are animals?" A more pertinent question would possibly be "Was he asleep?" Probably he was not, but if he was he is certainly not the first to dream of being a jolly dog.

DISEASE AND WAR.

THE enormous mortality from the influenza, which in London alone is calculated to have swept off five thousand lives, and probably disabled and invalided many thousand more, shows that disease after all is a far more potent agent of the gentleman in black with the sickle, than is war. Gettysburg had a good sized butcher's bill but the loss of six thousand lives in that battle does not begin to compare with the ravages of one attack of influenza. Without being paradoxical death may be described as a lively process. Dr. Richardson calculates that every year thirty millions of the human race pass over to the silent shades. The steady havoc of nature in one year exceeds the battle carnage of one hundred years. Every year one hundred and eighty thousand die by their own hand, more by seventy thousand than those who were killed in the four years of the war. A good deal of pulpit oratory is expended in denouncing the cruel results of warfare, but the loss of life from preventible disease seldom arouses the declamations of the most humane theologian.

APOPLEXY IN THE JURY-ROOM.

THE queen of Spain, it is reported, once fell off her horse. Her foot became entangled in the stirrup, and she was dragged in the muddy road. None of the officials near by could help her, for it was the sole privilege of the master-of-thehorse to assist the queen to dismount, and this public functionary was absent. History repeated itself in the case of the Fox will case recently tried in Boston. The court had been adjourned and the jury were deliberating on the verdict. One of the jurors was seized with apoplexy. The officer guarding the sanctity and secrecy of the jury-room was not empowered to grant admission to a physician so he sent word to the deputy sheriff. The deputy hesitated, but finally referred the matter to the sheriff. The sheriff declined to act and sent couriers to the judge, and he finally issued an order summoning a physician.

MEDICAL NEWS.

SMALL-POX is epidemic in Morocco.

VACCINATION is compulsory in Italy.

DR. H. R. CASGRAIN, of Windsor, was recently married. YELLOW FEVER is prevalent to an alarming extent in Brazil. SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, is to have a medical college for women. PROFESSOR LUMNITZER, the popular Hungarian surgeon, is dead. VIENNA will erect a hospital for the benefit of its consumptive poor. FROM 1872 to 1888 insanity increased about thirty per cent. in Paris. THE Kansas City medical college will establish a post-graduate school. THE French congress of surgery will open its sixth session in Paris, April 18. THERE are one hundred and five members in the French academy of medicine. THE American medical association will meet in Detroit, June 7, 8, 9, and 10. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW has been elected president of the Berlin medical society. PURE CULTURES of the influenza bacillus have been made by Dr. Canon, of Berlin.

THE order of the liberator is a decoration accorded Dr. Austin Flint by Venezuela.

THE university of Pennsylvania formally opened its institute of hygiene on February 22.

THE annual meeting of the Kansas state medical society will be held in Fort Scott, May 3.

THE third international medical congress of Australia will be held at Sidney in September.

THE university of Virginia is considering the advisability of establishing a summer school.

ELECTRICITY is said to be an aid to the diagnosis of ulcer of the stomach. Pain is intensified on passing the constant current over the region of an ulcer.

THE Scotchmen in Chicago are going to erect a new hospital and dedicate it to Bobby Burns.

THE municipal council of Paris has subscribed five hundred francs to a memorial to Ricord.

THE Rush hospital for consumptives at Philadelphia was formally opened on Thursday, February 4.

DR. A. H. PAQUET, professor of clinical medicine in the Laval university of Montreal, died recently.

OUT of about five thousand patent medicines put on the market annually less than one hundred survive.

THE Georgia state medical association will hold its forty-third annual session in Columbia, April 20 to 22.

THE Jewish hospital, of Philadelphia, has been enriched ten thousand dollars by the will of Joseph Muhr.

THE university of Paris is the largest in the world with nine thousand two hundred and fifteen students.

It is proposed to erect a crematorium in the Berlin city cemetery which shall be superior to any in Europe.

THE ex-internes of the Presbyterian hospital of New York organized an alumni association February 19.

THE Saint Louis medical college will have a new building to cost one hundred and seven thousand dollars.

DR. WILLIAM T. LUSK, of obstetric fame, has been elected an honorary member of the obstetrical society of London.

THE Eastern Kansas and Golden Belt medical societies will hold a joint meeting in Topeka, Kansas, April 7.

THE medical board of the Philadelphia hospital is considering the advisability of establishing an orthopedic department.

SEVERAL of our contemporaries are advertising a private hospital which is conducted by "a quack of the first water."

LONDON, England, has one thousand one hundred and twenty-three females in its population to every one thousand males.

THE Italians invented the word influenza in the seventeenth century attributing the disease to the influence of certain planets.

DR. J. H. BRYANT, of New York, has received the appointment of surgeongeneral on the staff of Governor Roswell P. Flower.

DR. C. H. GARDNER, of Maryland, has been commissioned assistant surgeon in the marine hospital service by President Harrison.

THE association of militia surgeons of the United States will meet in convention in memorial hall, Saint Louis, beginning April 19.

THE New York state board of health have rendered a report in which it is estimated that ten thousand people died of influenza in that state during 1891.

THE BACILLUS OF GOUT.-An alleged bacillus is said to have been observed in three cases of acute gout by Dr. Edward Grun.

LEPROSY is on the increase in the United States of Columbia, and the establishment of a leper colony is being considered.

A NEW building is in course of erection for the school of medicine of the university of Buffalo. It will be a magnificent structure.

MISS JAGANANAHAM, a Hindoo lady, has recently graduated from Edinburgh with much distinction. She is now at the Bombay hospital.

BOSTON will ask permission of the state legislature to appropriate five thousand dollars annually for the maintainance of the Carney hospital.

THE Langenbech Haus, a building erected in Berlin as a place of meeting for all the local medical societies, will be formally opened in April.

SAINT PETERSBURG will build a home for aged physicians. About eight thousand roubles have already been contributed for this purpose.

EX-SENATOR F. W. HOWE has donated five thousand dollars to the Lowell (Massachusetts) general hospital for the establishment of a free bed.

A NEW hospital for children will be opened in Saint Louis. It will be free for all children of the poor, regardless of color, nationality, or creed.

THE Tennessee state medical society will hold its annual meeting in Knoxville, beginning April 12. The secretary is Dr. D. E. Nelson, of Chattanooga.

THE Illinois state building of the world's fair will contain an exhibit to be made by the women physicians, pharmacists, and dentists practicing in Illinois. THE annual meeting of the Iowa state medical society will be held in Des Moines, May 18, 19, and 20. Dr. J. W. Cokenower, of Des Moines, is secretary.

THE association of American physicians will hold their next meeting in the medical museum and library, Washington, District of Columbia, May 24, 25, and 26.

THE royal college of physicians, of London, has two hundred and ninetyfive fellows, five hundred members, and about three thousand three hundred licentiates.

AN international gynecological and obstetrical congress will be held in Brussels next September. Mr. Lawson Tait has been invited to act as chairman and has accepted.

DR. JAMES BOWIE, of Mitchell, Ontario, recently died of catarrhal pneumonia at the advanced age of ninety years. He had practiced his profession for upward of sixty years.

DR. WILLIAM D. MIDDLETON, of Davenport, Iowa, has been appointed surgeonin-chief of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railway, vice Dr. W. F. Peck, who recently died.

PROFESSOR KOCH has made still further improvements in the manufacture of tuberculin, although in a recent communication before the Berlin medical society, Koch confesses the action of tuberculin is not all it should be.