Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/871

Rh the matter introduced by the American editors is distinguished by plain typographical devices.

work embodies the substance of a paper read at the last meeting of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates, and details the author's special method of treatment, which he has successfully practiced for several years. The author maintains that opium-addiction is a disease, seldom a vice, and should be treated as a disease. He advises against breaking off the practice abruptly, while he finds the other ordinary method of treatment, by gradual decrease of the opiate with tonics, inconveniently slow. His own method is a mean between the two extremes, and is based on the power of certain remedial resources to control abnormal reflex sensibility; and he claims for it the advantages of minimum duration of treatment and maximum freedom from pain.

author has written this work, he says, "for those members of the intelligent reading public who, without desiring to trench on the province of the physician and surgeon, or to dabble in the science and art of medical treatment of disease, wish to know the loading facts about the diseases of the human family, their causes and prevention. Any one, therefore, who opens this book with the expectation of finding in it receipts and nostrums will not have that expectation fulfilled, and will discover reference to no remedies except such as are purely preventive in character." The old historical terms are used in preference to the new; that classification of diseases is preferred which has descended from the best scholars in medical science and art, and which is best known to the people at large. Of the relative value of curative and preventive medicine, the latter "is not a science, it is not an art separated necessarily or properly from so-called curative medicine. On the contrary, the study of cure and prevention proceed well together, and he is the most perfect sanitarian, and he is the most accomplished and useful physician, who knows most both of the prevention of disease and of the nature and treatment of disease; he who knows, in fact, the before and the after of each striking phenomenon of disease that is presented for his observation." The investigation of the subject is directed to the tracing of diseases from their actual representation, as they exist before us, in their natural progress after their birth, back to their origin, and, as far as is practicable, to seek the conditions out of which they spring; and, further, to investigate the conditions, to see how far they are removable and how far they arc avoidable.

may have been a time when windmills were considered antiquated and of no further use, but it is so no longer. These simple and economical sources of power are quite generally employed in all parts of our country, and their use is increasing, and, according to Mr. Wolff, it is now greater than at any other period in the history of the world. "To place the number of windmills at work in America," he says, "at several hundred thousand is to give an estimate which those who have been interested in this department of engineering, and who have traveled along the main railroad lines of the country, must pronounce as low." And we are further informed that in some single cities of the Union over five thousand windmills are manufactured, on an average, each year. For those kinds of work in which the power is not required to be constant, but can be taken when it comes—such as pumping and storing water, compressing and storing air, and driving dynamo-machines to charge electrical accumulators—no machines can be cheaper than windmills, and they are efficient enough. American manufacturers have made great improvements in the machines, and their patterns are pronounced much better than the European patterns, and destined to supersede them. Mr. Wolff's treatise is practical and a little literary, for it gives a very