Grimm, of which a translation has just been issued, contains the strange statement that the letters so long preserved by the Buonarroti family have been handed over to the State authorities, with an injunction to forbid any revelation of their contents. Should this irrational entail be broken through (as common sense demands), we may hope to return to a subject which is little likely Pollajuolo to Gibson, Mr. Perkins justly German and narcotic, life by Herr considers has practically ruined Italian sculpture. The dead subjects of Greek or Roman mythology were substituted for subjects which appealed to living hearts and heads. In place of the sacred figures of Christian art, we have the foul revel of the Satyr, the heavy extravagance of the Neptune, or the nastiness of the painted Venus. But it is only the earlier portion of this "road downwards" (for no one can deny real, though to lose its interest as a tale, or its immisdirected, creative power to Polla-portance as a lesson. juolo, Torrigiano, or Giovanni Bologna) which falls within Mr. Perkins' province. To these artists, with the less important though once European reputations of Sansovino, Bandinelli, and others, he has devoted the same conscientious labor with which he has illustrated their predecessors. But we can only glance at this subject, adding that Mr. Perkins gives to the dismay, again, of collectors the brief list of best-authenticated specimens of the base but skillful Cellini, and that his print of the "Jonah," ascribed to Raffaelle, fully confirms that impossibility of successfully "cutting in" to sculpture from painting on which we dwelt in the course of last autumn. Michel Angelo is of course the great name-we may truly say, the one and only great name-during the last days of the Tuscan school. Once more, in Mr. Perkins' pages, we traverse that most melancholy of all artist-biographies -the misdirected training, hesitating between the frescoes of Ghirlandajo and the counsels of Lorenzo; the design for the Julius monument of colossal impossibility; years wasted in ignoble dispute, or buried in the quarries of Cararra; the insults of the unworthy, the cabals of the jealous; and last, but alas! not least, in the long series of misfortune, the sensitive nature and obstinate disposition of the misunderstood and unhappy Buonarroti. A sadder picture, we repeat, can hardly be found. Even the Sistine "Jeremiah" of the great painter-greater here, as is now generally recognized, than he was in sculpture-does not express more predominance or hopelessness of sorrow. But the materials for a complete judgment on Michel Angelo have not yet been published, at least in England. The elaborate, but eminently Blackwood's Magazine. DAY AND NIGHT. THE days were once too short for life and me— And said, "I come, I come! " yet came not yet, Though longed and looked for still from day to day. Too short for life-too short for hopes that made time. And but for glories sweet of stars and moon, It had been hard to suffer the long night— Thus was it on the other side of Time; While yet the path wound dubious up the heights And on that path amid the rising mists And on this road there was no need of night. The sweet and bitter of each unknown thing, And of all the mysteries the soul and heart. Now it is changed: up to the mountain-head All things have changed; but this most changed of all, That I have learned the busy day by heart, The path obscure* and wild has made me fear. So now, if there be any praise to say, And I were glad, if ever glad I were, They should shut close behind my flying feet But the light morning comes and wakes the world, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita This is the very morn, the selfsame morn, Night, that can blur the boundaries of time, Twas sweet to live when life was fresh and young; It would be sweet to live if life was old, age, The heavenly headlands heaving slow in sight. To know that Joy flashes his angel wings And think ye not the darkling night is dear To one with this chill landscape in his eyes? The gloom that blots the weary pathway out, And the dear sleep, which still 'tis possible Might steal the traveler unawares to heaven? Thus nightly to the tender night I make Beautiful night! that in thy dewy hand M. O. W. O. Popular Science Review. WAVES OF HEAT AND WAVES OF DEATH. BY B. W. RICHARDSON, M. A., M. D. WHILE our sanitarians are busily occupied in pointing out those evils of our social condition, on which many diseases rest that need never be seen or From an unreasonable blindness to sanitary defects, we have gradually drifted into an equally unreasonable measurement of them. In regard to spreading diseases we hear now almost exclusively of one cause-drains and the smells thereof. developed but for our own misdoings, and while it is our duty to listen to what they have to say, and to follow the simple precepts which they lay down for our guidance, it is well for us not to lose sight of the all-important fact that there are certain influences at work in the The evidence is conclusive that production of diseases over which the certain disorders-some forms of consanitarian has no control. In some sens- tinued fever, for instance-are due to es, indeed, sanitary science, in the midst emanations from sewers and drains; and of great achievements, has, to a certain it is possible that some of the other comextent, been an obstruction to scientific municable diseases are, under special progress. This is no paradox. When circumstances, communicated by the our first sanitary reformers commenced same emanations; but, after all, the their great works they had such a strong case in their hands, they had such prominent evils to contend with, they had such flattering promises to offer, such rewards for the waiting, hoping masses, and such triumphs for the zeal and labors of their own disciples, that when they once obtained a hearing they were heard to the exclusion of nearly all else. Oh! the happy days that were to come -the millennium of health, how near was its advent! Henceforth, we were not to cure diseases in detail, but to prevent them in phalanx. The epidemics were to be wiped out, and the nation that nurtured them was to be stamped uncivilized, gross, and dangerous-a gigantic upas tree, infecting a world elsewise physically pure. I, who have been one of the stanchest advocates of sanitary progress, can not, I hope, be doubted, in repeating that the results of sanitary work, although they have fulfilled much, have not been prosecuted without some disadvantage. I think that they have tended rather largely to damp the energies of many able and observant men in that line of medical inquiry which professes to treat disease; I fear they have thrown a cloud of skepticism over the whole art of treating; and I am certain they have given rise to the invention of sundry theories and speculations, which do not account for various common and all-important phenomena. But that which is most to be complained of is the tendency to which they have led, of ignoring pervading influences, active in the production of disease, and of supplementing the knowledge of these influences by referring forms of disease that have been observed to some insanitary condition. NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 5. drain is only one means for the propagation of a limited class of spreading disorders, and if we continue looking only into the drain for all this class, as we have been looking for some few years past, we shall lose by our devotion to the contemplation more than we ever gained by being first directed to that line of research. We will not forget the drain, however, nor the bad smell, nor bad water, nor uncleanliness in general, as causes of diseases. That would, indeed, be mistaken policy; but we will suppose all the drains pure, all the water unexceptionable, and every dwellinghouse and the body itself clean, and what then? Physical millennium? No! Death finds dirt an ally, but he can do without it, and although cleanliness - is sometimes his opponent, it is more commonly a neutral. Without a word against sane sanitary science, I want on this occasion to point out that there are in nature certain agencies at work which determine many of our common and fatal diseases, and which lie apart from the ordinary social conttol of man, according to his present wisdom and acquirement. To put the matrer in a very strong light, let us look at a man struck dead by a flash of lightning; that man did not die from any cause over which sanitary science could exert control: he died, and we all confess the fact, from the effects of an external force which is out of our hands: there is no reason why science should not ultimately be wise enough to come in and restore the man after the accident, but it could hardly make every necessary protection against the accident. Just as purely external in their origins, and invincible in their powers, are certain 37 other outside agencies, which the sanitarian can not touch. These agencies differ from the lightning flash, because they are more widely diffused, and, therefore, more inappreciable, but they are not the less outside, and not the less unpreventi ble. We may take, in illustration of this fact, the most frequent disease-common cold. Whence comes it? Why should a fourth of England wake in the morning with cold? Why, for some weeks past, should sore throat have been so prevalent that scarcely any one could be met who, on inquiry, would not be found with the back of the throat unduly red, and the tonsils large? Why, in a given village or town, shall the medical men be summoned on some particular day to two or half-a-dozen places perhaps at once, to visit children with croup? What is the reason that many cases of sudden death, by so-called "apoplexy," crowd together into a few hours? Why, in a given day or week, are shoals of the aged swept away, while the young live as before! These are questions which are above the answering of curative and preventive medicine alike. Curative medicine, if her interpreter be honest, at the name of them, stands abashed; and preventive medicine says, if her interpreter be true, "The questions are as yet out of my range." Still, we are not altogether ignorant: some circumstances appear to be followed by effects so definite, that we may almost consider we have them before us, in an obscure picture of cause and effect. It will be profitable to look at this picture, and try to make it out from various points of view; but I must confine myself to one point now, viz., to the simple influence of a low wave temperature on life. If we carefully observe the fluctuation of the thermometer by the side of the mortality of the nation at large, no very remarkable relationship seems to be traceable between the one and the other. But if, in connection with the mortality, care be taken to isolate the cases, and to divide them into groups according to their ages, a singular and significant series of facts follow, which show that after a given age a sudden decline of the temperature influences mortality by what may be considered a definite law. The law is, that up to the age of thirty years variations of temperature exert no influence on the mortality of the population; but after the age of thirty is reached, then a fall of temperature, which is sufficient to cause an increased number of deaths, acts in a given manner—as it may be said in waves or lines of intensity, according to the years of the people. If we make these lines nine years long, we discover that they double in force at each successive point. Thus, if the fall in the temperature be sufficient to increase the mortality at the rate of one person of the age of thirty, the increase will run as follows: One death at thirty years of age. In these calculations nothing seems to be wanting that should render them trustworthy; they result from inquiries conducted on the largest scale; they have been computed by our greatest authority in vital statistics, and they accord with what we gather from common daily observation; they supply, in a word, the scientific details and refinements of a rough estimate founded on universal experience, and they lead us to think very gravely on many subjects which may not have occurred to us before, and which are as curious as they are absorbing. We often hear small moralizers, who know little or nothing about vital phenomena-by which term I mean nothing mysterious, but simply the physics embraced in those phenomena which we connect with form and motion under the generic term, life-we often hear, I say, small moralizers harp on the one string, that man knows nothing of the laws of life and death. But what an answer to such presumption of ignorance do the facts rendered above supply! Why, life and death are here reduced on given conditions to reasonings as abstract and positive as are the reasonings on the atomic theory, or the development of force by the combustion of fuel. It is not necessary for the vital philosopher to go out into the towns and villages to take a new census of deaths to enable him to give us his readings of the general mortality under this one specific state. He may sit in his cabinet now, and as he reads day by day his thermometer, predict results. There is a fall of temperature that shall be known by experience to be sufficiently deep and prolonged to cause an increase of one death in a given community, among those who have reached thirty years. Is it so? Then there have died sixty-four in proportion to that one of those who have reached eighty-four years. This is a good reflection, and it leads to another reflection, not so good. It leads one to ask what, if the law be so definite, are curative and preventive medicines doing meanwhile, that they should not disturb it? I fear that they do not even produce perturbations, and I do not see how they could at this moment; because, as the truth opens itself to the mind, the enormous external change in the forces of the universe that leads to the result, is not to be grappled with or interfered with on any efficient known method of human kind or invention. The cause is too general, too overwhelming, too grasping. It is like the lightning-stroke in its distance from our command; but it is diffused, not pointed and concentrate; prolonged, not instantaneous; and, by virtue of these properties, it is so much the more subtle and devastating. to 212° Fahr. under all ordinary temperatures, which is about the fact, and if we assume that another man at thirtynine, shall not be able at any temperature to respire so much air, and shall not be able to evolve as much caloric as would raise forty-four pounds of water from 32° to 212° we see a general reason why the latter man should feel an effect from a sudden change in the temperature of the air which the younger man would not feel; and if we assume, further, that a man of eighty-four, in the same time would evolve as much force as would raise only eleven pounds of water from 32° to 212°, we see a general reason that he should suffer much more from a decrease of external temperature than either of the two younger men. It behoves us, however, to know more than this general statement of an approximate fact; we ought to understand the exact method by which the reduction of temperature influences, and the details of the physiological processes that are connected with the phenomena. I will try and explain these clearly, although I know they are not easy of explanation. When a human body is living at the age where the period of growth has ceased, and the period of decay has not conmenced, and when it is quite healthy, it generates, by its own chemical processes, so much heat or force as shall enable it, within given bounds, to move its own At first it seems very easy to explain machinery, to call forth at will a limited why a sudden fall in temperature should measure of extra force which has been lead to an increase in the number of lying latent in the organism, and to supdeaths, and it is to be admitted that, to ply a fluctuating loss that must be cona certain extent, the reason is clear. veyed away by contact with the surWithout entering on the question which rounding air, by the earth, and by other the old Greeks so warmly contended for bodies that it may touch, and which are -Heraclitus above them all-that heat is colder than itself. There is thus evolved the animating principle of all living or- in the body, applied force, reserve force, ganisms, we may accept that in the evo- and waste force, and these distributions lution of force from the body, as repre- of the whole force generated, when corsented by its power of producing force rectly applied, maintain the perfect orin the form of heat, we have a measure- ganism in such balance that life is true ment of the capacity of the body to sus- and steady. So much active force cartain force, which is only another phrase ries with it the power to perform so for expressing the resistance of the body much labor; so much reserve force carto death. For example, if we assume ries with it the power to perform a meathat a healthy man of twenty-nine years, sure of new and extra labor to meet respires four hundred and fifty cubic feet emergencies; so much waste force enaof air per day, and by combustion of his bles the body to resist the external viciscarbon, evolves as much heat as would situdes without trenching on the force dị raise fifty pounds of water at 32° Fahr. that is always wanted to keep the heart |