Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/218

206 wound some little time, and the wound often seems trivial to have caused death. Since surgical aid to all is out of the question, why should not every soldier be his own surgeon? Suppose his pack contained a tourniquet, bandages, and lint, to the use of which he has been trained; also, a draught of some strong cordial which might sustain his own life or that of a comrade in extremities, until the relief corps should appear. A simple knowledge of the tourniquet, of bandages, and lint, and readiness to improvise substitutes, have saved countless lives. Lack of knowledge, sometimes, and sometimes an inexcusable lack of materials, have sacrificed thousands. A wounded soldier of our civil war stopped a severe hæmorrhage in the neck by clogging the artery with balls made of sand and blood-clot. He had nothing better at hand.



N the byways of science, as on the scenes of a theatre and in the pages of fiction, an alias is often found to serve a very convenient purpose. But it is always a little disappointing, to those in search of a veritable novelty, to find in place of it only a discredited piece of antiquity, though varnished, polished, and faced with a new color; and it is not inspiriting, even to the dilettante of the drama or of fiction, to be put off with old and worn-out characters, masquerading under new names, with fantastic costumes and modern effects, however ingenious and startling.

The modern Athenians, who dignify themselves with the title of psychical researchers, have for some time been inviting us to the investigation of what they have led us to believe were altogether new departures into the domain of mental philosophy. A new horizon was opened out before us; methods of the communication of thought were described which set distance at naught, which dispensed with speech or gesture, touch, sight, or smell. Sensation, we were told, was transmissible without material expression; mental impressions could be conveyed by the unexpressed power of the will, character could be transferred by subtle and invisible channels into those whose morality required strengthening, or whose self-control needed bracing. All this has been indicated with some confidence, and with a careful and measured approximation to methods of rational inquiry, by some English observers whose competence in literature and some departments of physical