Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/867

Rh. Whatever his advice, it has incalculably more value in preventing a crisis than in dealing with it after it has come to pass. Just as the best services of the lawyer are not in advocacy so much as in steering his client clear of the courts, so the doctor finds his worthiest skill to be in keeping his patient free from the need of cure or healing.

In the task of maintaining healthful conditions, general and special, a science has grown up in which not only the physician but the architect, the sanitary engineer, the purveyor of food and drink, the manufacturer of clothing, have deep interests. This great science of hygiene is now worthily represented in the University of Pennsylvania by a special laboratory devoted to it, which was formally opened on February 22d. It has been planned by Dr. John S. Billings, who is its director. The means for carrying it on are to be credited to the liberality of citizens of Philadelphia. The laboratory contains research rooms for investigations upon air, water, food, soil, and clothing; work-shops and photomicrographic rooms, and special arrangements for demonstrating the principles and practice of heating and ventilation, and of house drainage. In addition there are ample laboratories for chemical and bacteriological research. The course of instruction embraces the whole range of sanitary science—the disposal of refuse, the management of contagious diseases, the offensive and dangerous trades, methods of vital statistics, and sanitary jurisprudence. In directing this important work Dr. Billings is assisted by Dr. A. O. Abbott, recently Assistant in Bacteriology and Hygiene at Johns Hopkins University.

All honor to the men and women who have made this noble gift to their kind I It will mean joy and life to many thousands who else were doomed to hopeless suffering and premature death.

British mind seems prone to conjure up terrors. The proposed tunnel under the Strait of Dover, whose importance to English commerce would probably equal that of all the docks of London, is made impossible by the affrighted query, What if the French should send an invading army against us under the sea? A display of this ludicrous apprehensiveness, of more special interest to cultivators of science, was given by The Spectator in an article on the celebration of Prof. Virchow's seventieth birthday. Is such public homage as Prof. Virchow received on this occasion, The Spectator asks, "good for science or good for the world in general?" Its fear is that unworthy persons will be drawn into the pursuit of science for the sake of the applause to be won therein, and it therefore looks askance at the dawning tendency to bestow merited praise upon the achievements of scientiflc men. The Spectator's ideal man of science—devoted to knowledge for its own sake, or rather for his own gratification, and wholly indifferent to the good opinion of others—is a rare and regretableregrettable [sic]phenomenon. The real man of science is a human being having the same warm sympathy with his fellow-men and the same need of their sympathy and appreciation that is found in the normally constituted man of any other calling. Shall a due measure of public esteem be denied to these men lest a few undeserving persons may try to share it? The services of scientific investigators have too long been repaid with proscription or neglect. Men whose occupation is the pursuit of truth know full well what justice is; and, if they are made to feel the smart of persistent injustice and the chill of unvarying loneliness, their capacity for work will be sure to suffer from these repressing influences.

But The Spectator has another apprehension, that rises to the dignity of a well-developed bogy. The aforesaid