Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/287

Rh results in the human body. There are many homely illustrations of this fact—as when one has a headache which disappears on the coming of some unexpected visitor, to return as soon as he is gone, or when a patient is relieved on the administration of a bread-pill. The speaker himself had been so interested in looking at a microscopic object that people had come into his room and spoken to him, and he had not heard or seen them. Looking at these physiological conditions, a great many things can be brought about which are described as being induced by the agency of another person. The speaker estimated the frequency with which such agencies can be made successful as in inverse proportion to the development of the higher ganglia.-People are influenced by them in the inverse order of their intellectual faculties, and in the direct order of the automatic activities of the brain; hence the range in which such phenomena are capable of being seen and produced is practically what is called the neurotic range. This includes people whose nervous systems are movable, excitable, sensitive, irritable, or explosive. All such people are capable of manifesting phenomena which are brought about by attention, expectation, and concentration; and we find, too, that all these phenomena occur in people with a lowly developed nervous system, which is to a great extent automatic, and is manifestly enforced by emotion. The hypnotic phenomena which are related were supposed to be capable of explanation on the simple physiological grounds thus laid down, without the introduction of any person exercising a mysterious power.

Scenery of Yellowstone Park.—The merits of the scenery of Yellowstone Park appear to Prof. G. F. Wright to have been considerably exaggerated. He rode through it under favorable conditions for observation, but found his trip, on the whole, disappointing. The figures representing the height of the mountains around it above the sea are deceptive. A mountain 10,000 or 11,000 feet high does not look extraordinarily large and massive when it rises not more than 2,000 or 3,000 feet above the elevated plateau on which it stands as a base; but those 2,000 or 3,000 feet are all that is shown of the mountain-rim of the park, while the glimpses to the outside mountains are few and far between. The grandest views are those on entering the park as one looks outward from the encircling rim. "Those who reside in the Atlantic States do not need to go to the Rocky Mountains for scenery." Even Dr. Hayden acknowledged this substantially after he had been to the Crawford Notch. "He who has seen the Adirondacks and the White Mountains has seen some of the best artistic effects of which Nature is capable. Even he who has looked over the parallel ranges of Pennsylvania has no need to pine for the mountain scenery of the Yellowstone Park." The beauty of the Yellowstone Canon, however, with its unique combinations of rock-carving and variegated color, which "artists are put to shame in their attempts to imitate," can hardly be surpassed. The geysers, Prof. Wright says, in the Boston Congregationalist, "are decidedly vulgar, and one can afford to die without seeing them. Boiling paint-pots, with only one dull color in them, are not inspiring. Acres of land laid waste by sulphurous waters and gases, such as greet one on every hand in these geyser basins, can be seen at any time in Pennsylvania where the refuse water is pumped from the coal-mines to spread its desolation all around. The Upper Geyser basin, with its score or more of steam-jets, looks from a distance like a flourishing manufacturing town. The odors can be matched in the calico-printing mills. The geysers differ from steam fire-engines in throwing hot water instead of cold; and even the Excelsior is not as impressive as the ocean surf of the New England coast." But the author thinks that the scientific interest of the park can hardly be exaggerated.

Mosquito-inoculation against Yellow Fever.—Statements are made by two physicians of Havana (Drs. Finlay and Delgado), in the medical journal of that city, concerning their practice of inoculating persons newly arrived in Cuba against yellow fever by means of mosquitoes which have been caused to contaminate themselves by stinging a patient afflicted with that disease. The observations have been carried on for ten years, and relate to fifty-two cases of