Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/876

858 already described that brought Dumas to the reaction whereby hydrogen sulphide may be oxidized to sulphuric acid. He found the walls of one of the bath rooms at Aix-les-Bains covered with crystals of calcium sulphate, which could have no other source than the vapors liberated from the hot water.

Range of the Human Voice.—In discussing a paper read before the Section of Physics of the American Association, Prof. W. Le Conte Stevens remarked that the lowest recorded tone of the voice is that of a basso named Fischer, who lived during the sixteenth century, and who sounded F0, about forty-three vibrations per second. Mr. Stevens himself, without possessing a bass voice, has sounded as low as A0, fifty-three and a third vibrations per second, when his vocal cords were thickened by an attack of catarrh. This, however, is under abnormal conditions. The highest note hitherto recorded in the books was attained in singing by Lucrezia Ajugari. At Parma in 1770 she sang for Mozart several passages of extraordinarily high pitch, one of which included C6, two thousand and forty-eight vibrations per second. She trilled in D6, eleven hundred and fifty-two vibrations, and was able to sing as low as G2, one hundred and ninety-two vibrations, having thus a range of nearly four octaves and a half. Ajugari's upper limit has been attained by Ellen Beach Yaw, of Rochester. Mr. Stevens has often estimated, by comparisons with a tuning fork, the pitch of a child's squeal while at play, which has been repeatedly found to be in excess of twenty-five hundred vibrations per second, in one case as high as G6, about three thousand and seventy-two vibrations. The total range between these extremes is in excess of six octaves.

Criminal Anthropology.—Among reasons for including anthropology among the preparatory studies for medicine, Mr. Havelock Ellis refers to special branches of practice in which knowledge of it is of great assistance—such as practice abroad among different races, and practice among the insane at home, and in dealing with the phenomena of crime. Numbers of criminals inherit their qualities and transmit them, and constitute a distinct class. Their increase must be prevented by dispersing them and checking the reproduction of their kind. In the light of these principles, Lombroso has constructed his system of criminal anthropology. The Lancet says that in Paris medical experts are appointed to examine the persons arrested overnight, and to send to asylums those whom they find to be troubled with brain disease, whereby they are secured from association with criminals and soon may be restored to soundness. Dr. Benedikt, of Vienna, has done great service in this line of practice in his studies of criminals of different types. Three factors are named by Dr. Clouston which should be taken cognizance of in criminal anthropology, viz.: The heredity of the criminal; his brain, with its reactive and resisting qualities in each case; and the criminal's surroundings, immediate and permanent. The first takes account of the past history of the criminal's family, and the transmission of its inherited diseases into other diseases in offspring. The second factor, involving the receptivity and reactive power of the brain, its resources in self-control, especially in withstanding pain, fear, temptation, and other trials of the moral sense, concerns a wide field and presents great difficulties to the investigator. The third factor includes the mental and social atmosphere in which the subject of criminal anthropological inquiry has been brought up, and must comprise early companionship, moral and religious influence, and whatever contributes to motive in its less healthy tissues. "Those tracts of the brain cortex organized for mental processes are the field in which the future character of the individual—criminal or non-criminal—germinates and grows; they are, as Dr. Clouston well puts it, 'the fullest of hereditary qualities, the most powerful, yet the most notable, by far the most physiologically valuable part of man,' and the question that confronts the student of criminality he formulates thus: 'Have we among us men and women whose mental cortex is of such quality that in its ordinary environment the conduct of its possessors must necessarily be an ti social and lawless? and if so, what anatomical, physiological, and psychological signs are there to distinguish this criminal cortex and its possessor?'" The Italian