The Scientific Monthly, October to December, 1915

The great war debts of the nations of Europe began with representative government. Kings borrowed money when they could, bankrupting themselves at intervals and sometimes wrecki...

In common with all primitive peoples, their names of men and women are descriptive of some peculiarity or circumstance associated with the person named. Indeed, names were often...

But where will the material thus worn go? Into the sea. Going into the ocean it will raise the level of the sea slowly but surely. At present, for every four feet of elevation t...

5. If the Earth consisted of a thin solid shell upon a liquid interior there would be tides in the liquid interior, the crust would yield to these tides almost as if it were com...

One other question remains to be answered. It has long been noted that the old or thoroughly dried corms of the Indian turnip are not acrid like those that are fresh. The explan...

Another difficulty afterwards encountered was the scarcity of material susceptible to infection, for, although several men had expressed a willingness to be inoculated, when the...

A slightly older stage of stellar existence is indicated by the type of spectrum in which some of the lines of hydrogen, always those at the violet end, are dark, and the remain...

The evolution of the calendar is not an inapt illustration of the methods of science, and of the part which it has played in shaping the destiny of man. Out of the unregarded la...

'I live alone and wretched, confined like the pith within the bark of the tree.... My voice is like a wasp imprisoned within a sack of skin and bone. ... My teeth rattle like th...

The strong, confident person who has strength to spare, reserves of energy, does his work easily and without friction. Half the timidities and indecisions of men are chargeable...

Dostoievsky, on the other hand, reached this philosophy largely by being born to it among the humble people who lived it. Melancholy-minded by nature--a sort of a Russian Dante...

Papua, the land of the tired eyes and the earnest face, of the willing spirit and the weary body, waning as strength fails year by year in malaria and heat, the land wherein the...

Of the many forms of business and financial relation among men, none is more important than those included under the name of insurance. Insurance is a form of mutual help. By it...

In the subsequent history of Rome, we have now to consider only a single factor, the reversal of selection." In Rome's conquests, Vir, the real man, went forth to battle and for...

In the meantime the city of Havana was being rendered sanitary in a way which experience had taught would have overcome any bacterial infection, and, in fact, the diseases of fi...

Early society is dominated by the elders; its practices and customs have been determined by them and, in the most primitive society, government is nothing but a gerontocracy, a...

The so-called new stars, otherwise known as temporary stars or novae, present interesting considerations. These are stars which suddenly flash out at points where previously no...

To get at the influence of the ethnological factor the Gaulic, Cimbrian, Iberian, Ligurian and Belgic elements of the population were examined as to their fecundity in talent. O...

Galvani concluded that the contraction in this case, as in the earlier experiments, was produced by an electric stimulation, and since the metals seemed to him to serve merely a...

It would not be difficult to increase greatly the number of the given illustrations of unsolved questions relating directly to the natural numbers. In fact, the well-known great...

Professor J. W. A. Young, of the University of Chicago, in his work on "Mathematics in Prussia," says: "In the work in mathematics done in the nine years from the age of nine on...

The authors succeed well, I think, in showing that the satellites should prefer to revolve around their planets in the direction of the planetary revolution and rotation, especi...

THUS far our description of the stellar universe has been confined to its geometrical properties. A serious study of the evolution of the stars must seek to determine, first of...

8. Laplace assumed a nebula whose form was a function of its rotational speed, its gravitation, its internal heat, and, although he does not so state, of its internal friction....

Compare with such phenomena of acclimatization the responses of sulphur, tin, liquid crystals and iron alloys to changes of temperature. The rhombic crystals that characterize s...

THE Missouri Botanical Garden has recently celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation and the New York Botanical Garden its twentieth anniversary. Within these sh...

We three left the yellow-fever hospital together that afternoon; I got down from the doherty-wagon where the road forks, going on to the Military Hospital, while Carroll and Laz...

The problem of the moving air mass, however, is more complicated than it looks. For with the air is mixed a quantity of water vapor. In a strict sense they are independent varia...

The chemist has made the wine industry reasonably independent of climatic conditions; he has enabled it to produce substantially the same wine, year in and year out, no matter w...

It appears to have been understood before Jenner's time that persons who had acquired cowpox by handling cattle, but especially by milking cows, were immune from smallpox. In th...

There is no doubt that Jenner's medical contemporaries, at least in England, failed to appreciate the magnitude of the gift their colleague had presented not merely to his own c...

In spite of these qualifications, however, it becomes apparent that the statistics above established can not be rejected. Although they do not exactly justify Dr. Woods's conclu...