Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/715

Rh all the gods they knew to follow instanter, as some one had died and they might be accused of bewitching. The doctor followed, nothing loath to get on the road so easily.

The magician, when answering questions, shakes his gourd and examines the claws, teeth, and pebbles it contains. From these he receives his oracles, and according to their position his answers are satisfactory or the reverse, but generally shrewd advice if somewhat ambiguous. It is they who prepare war medicine and doctor soldiers for the field; they, too, prepare the poison bowl and administer it to those who are to be tried by that means. At births, deaths, and marriages they are in constant attendance, and, while the chief derives his revenue largely from voluntary gifts, the magicians receive fees which are rigidly exacted.—Journal of the Anthropological Institute.



HE name of Robert Hare, said the American Journal of Science at the time of his death, "has for more than half a century been familiar to men of science as a chemical philosopher, and to the cultivators of the useful arts throughout the civilized world." Dr. Hare was born in Philadelphia, January 17, 1781, and died in the same place, May 15, 1858. His father, the proprietor of a large brewery in Philadelphia, was an Englishman of strong mind, occupying a prominent position in society, and enjoying the confidence of his fellow-citizens. The management of this concern shortly fell into the hands of the son. He was soon drawn away from it, however, by the strength of his predilection for scientific pursuits; and before he was twenty years old he was enrolled as an attendant of the course of lectures on chemistry and physics in Philadelphia, and became a member of the Chemical Society of that city. There he found Priestley, Sybert, and Woodhouse among his associates. To this society he communicated in 1801 a description of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, which was then called the hydrostatic blowpipe, and which Prof. Silliman, who had been engaged with him in 1802 and 1803 in a series of experiments with the instrument, afterward called the compound blowpipe. On his return from Philadelphia, in 1803, Prof. Silliman constructed for Yale College the first pneumatic trough combining Dr. Hare's invention; an apparatus which was afterward figured and described by Dr. Hare in his memoir on the Fusion of Strontia and the Volatilization of Platinum—a paper which was republished in London and in the