Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/479

Rh In some experiments which we made last summer, simultaneously with some flashes, we got little sparks from a wire in the air.

12. So many people suffer so keenly from a kind of nervous alarm during thunderstorms that it is a great pleasure to be able to point out that the danger is vastly overestimated. "Heaven has more thunders to alarm than thunderbolts to punish" was the old irreverent way of putting it. One who lives to see lightning need not worry about the results.

13. The notion that lightning never strikes twice in the same place is erroneous. We have numerous cases disproving this.

14. If you are near a person who has been struck by lightning, go to work at once to try and restore consciousness. Try to stimulate the respiration and circulation, and do not cease in the effort to restore animation for at least one hour.



O tendency of these times is more marked than that toward organization. It manifests itself as plainly in scientific inquiry, literary investigation, or the cultivation of art as in the sphere of industry or finance. Let chemistry, folk lore, or musical education engage the minds of a group of people, and forthwith they unite themselves to further the interest they have at heart. The societies thus created have often manifold utility; they provide rallying centers for men and women of kindred aims, whether these aims are of popular acceptance or not; they make possible a co-operation which economizes the labor of observation or research; they furnish agencies for the spread of information accessible nowhere else; in their "proceedings" or "transactions" they publish valuable papers which otherwise would never see the light of day, and often these volumes are the sole registry of progress in important branches of inquiry or revolutionary reform. The public mind may be profoundly exercised concerning a wrong or a grievance, but its discontent is powerless until, let us say, a Free-trade League is born to serve as a nucleus around which public opinion can crystallize, which will gather and clarify argument to be echoed by a thousand friendly voices, and which will press its fight at every opportunity. Only in this way can an interest which concerns everybody only a little tell in legislation against a much smaller interest which concerns a few plunderers a great deal.

Of course, the meeting of a league or a society, whatever its objects, is determined in character by that of the organization 