Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/717

Rh gave a new impetus to the movement by founding the first American university chair of sociology to be officially called by that name, and by calling to it Prof. Giddings, who holds that social ethics can never teach us what social relations ought to be until sociology has analyzed and classified them as they are; discovered how, through an evolutionary process, they came to be as they are; and explained in terms of natural causation why they are what they are, and not in all respects what we might wish them to be.

For university purposes it is obviously necessary to limit rather definitely the field of sociology, because a considerable part of the comprehensive and detailed study of society falls within the departments of political economy and public law. Now the lines of demarcation ought to be drawn, with due regard to a logical classification, has been a question of practical interest to teachers, and the occasion of the recent annual meeting of the American Economic Association, in this city, was made the opportunity for a conference. The conclusion reached was that sociology is the master science that co-ordinates the special social sciences, and that, in teaching, the co-ordination must be shown not only by pointing out the interdependent relations of the different groups of social phenomena, a merely descriptive process, but by concentrating attention on those phenomena that are so elementary, or fundamental, that they are found in all groups, and are presupposed by all the special social sciences. Sociology is thus for university purposes the science of social elements and first principles, and therefore the fundamental and co-ordinating social science; a science of what is and has been, sharply distinguished from social ethics, but offering to social ethics legitimate data for a study of what ought to be.

With sociology as thus conceived more and more thoroughly taught in our universities, we may hope that the educated public will begin to entertain truer notions of what society is, and of the laws of its evolution.

the writing of Dr. Armstrong's paper on the treatment of diphtheria by antitoxine serum, published in the Monthly for February, certain additional data have appeared that seem worth presenting to our readers.

Prof. Jaime Ferran, of Barcelona, has called attention to the fact that in April, 1890, he published a paper in which he described a safe and practical method of immunizing animals against fatal doses of the diphtheria poison, and thus he anticipated Prof. Karl Fraenkel's communication on the same subject by eight months. But, unfortunately for the Spanish bacteriologist, he did not carry his experiments to the ultimate point to which Behring carried Fraenkel's investigations, resulting in the antitoxine serum.

Recent investigations in relation to the duration of immunization have shown that the antitoxic properties of the serum of children who have had diphtheria do not appear until between the eighth and tenth days after recovery from the disease, but the property persists for several months. Antitoxic serum, however, immunizes more rapidly than the disease itself, but it does not produce a refractory state of equally long duration.

A further evidence of the value of the antitoxine serum is shown by a paper by Dr. Moizard, who administered it in two hundred and thirty-one cases of diphtheria in the Paris Trousseau Hospital, with a mortality of only 14·7 per cent. During the same months, October and November, in other years the mortality had never been less than fifty per cent. Prof. Widerhofer, of Vienna, treated one hundred patients with the serum, with a mortality of twenty-four