Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/734

716 Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. This species can not, however, be included in any known genus, as these are at present defined, and for that reason Mr.. Scott has proposed for it the name Cervalces Americanus. The most obvious peculiarity of the skeleton is the great length of the legs, which gives the animal a stilted appearance, while the thorax is shallow and the neck short The shoulders are higher than the hips, as in the moose, and unlike those of the stag. The combined length of the head and neck shows that in the ordinary position of the legs the muzzle would not reach the ground by fourteen or fifteen inches. Measured in the same manner, the moose's muzzle reaches to within about ten inches from the ground, and that of Megaceros to eight or nine inches. This and some other features of the structure indicate that the habits of the animal, and to some degree its appearance, were those of the moose. Its short neck shows that it would have great difficulty in grazing, and so probably lived by browsing upon shrubs and trees. This was aided by a more or less prehensile upper lip, which the character of the nasal opening shows to have been more proboscis-like than in the deer, though far less so than in the moose. Morphologically, the fossil is of interest for the light which it seems to throw upon the question of the genus Alees, and its relations to the typical deer.

Many Drugs: Few Remedies.—In an address on "Many Drugs: Few Remedies," Dr. George K. Welch, of Keyport, New Jersey, draws a highly-colored picture of the helplessness of the average medical practice in the face of disease. The schools increase and the graduates swarm, "but how many great physicians can you name, and which are the diseases borne under the annual spring-flood of doctors; and yet, where is the young doctor who does not believe in the magic of drugs, and the old doctor, if he be a wise man, who does not look upon the most of them as mischievous, and the minority as deserving of restriction? The pathologist is skeptical of them all. With laborious zeal we study diseases. . . . We anatomize and compare, and the professor awes with learned length while he discourses of the ills he can not cure. . . . Do we, waiting behind the eye of Koch, know anything of tuberculosis, or believe that he does? Does not the ravage go on? And who has won eminence in curing yellow fever? Arc men no longer in dread of cholera? And the exanthemata—does not the grewsome pendulum of disease sweep into and out of every neighborhood about once in five years? Who cures rheumatism, or typhoid fever, or chronic Bright's disease? And where is the stout heart that never failed before a patient burning and broiling in the horrible slow flame of pyæmia? And jet, who refrains from prescribing? The witches move one way about the caldron, and we go the other; they throw in the drugs that brew the poisons, and we throw in the counter-poisons. Stillé and Maisch'a 'Dispensatory' has a list of one hundred and fifty remedies for rheumatism, a disease which is as likely to become chronic with treatment as without it. Everybody has a specific, from your grandaunt with teas, fomentations, and flannel, to the last German doctor with forty grains of salycilic acid to the dose. . . . The trouble is, medical thought moves too much toward specifics." Improvement must come, partly by enforcing the responsibility of every physician to all, or by the establishment of a college of experimental medicine, with a system of registration for correcting errors of observation; or, in other words, by adopting for the study of disease the methods of the experimental physiologists.

Reform of Juries.—The causes of the decline of juries and the remedy for it are considered by Mr. Edwin Young, of the Albany bar, in a paper on "The Jury in Modern Corporate Life." The theory of the institution, that "twelve disinterested freeholders of the neighborhood, of average intelligence and virtue, are best qualified to determine issues of fact," ought, if carried out, to secure an ideal tribunal. It does not secure it, but something far different. The reason of the deterioration that has come over juries is easily found in the exemptions allowed by law, some of them really unnecessary and even improper when the true view of the case is taken, which furnish a loop-hole through which a considerable body of our best citizens escape from