that when Dr. Tanner took the large quantity of water on the sixteenth day of his fast he went beyond the margin of safety. When his hands and feet began to swell he was for the time in danger. The danger would consist in the effect produced in the bodily temperature, and in the too extreme fluidity of the blood that would follow rapid dilution.

The lesson respecting famine extends from the particular to the general. It passes from the physician to the statesman. Cornelius Walford, in his truly valuable essay on the famines of the world, past and present, teaches that, while combined with moisture, solar heat affords the most certain means of securing luxuriance; without the moisture, it causes a howling wilderness. The fact is evidenced in India, where, under irrigation of land without luxuriant vegetation to defend the earth, there is, even in the presence of water, a howling wilderness and a district for famine, as if the earth itself lost its power to live and reproduce when the famine of drought came upon it. The lesson taught is, that to prevent districts of famine the same plan must be followed that was followed by the New York enthusiast; the sources of natural moisture for mother Earth herself must be kept up, so that, though she may be deprived of carboniferous and nitrogenous food, she may revivify when the normal conditions of life are restored. But even with the earth the supply of water must be gentle and moderate. Flood it, and it is destroyed. The life that it holds, deprived of due supplies, will live after long deprivation, and will be renewed in all its luxuriance if it be re-fed with natural prevision.

IV.

The experiment carried out by Dr. Tanner has another and more practical application as a lesson of daily life. In cases of accident, as in coal-mines, when living human beings are buried away and given up for lost, it is now plainly-I had almost said authoritatively suggested to us that more prolonged search should be made for those that are lost than is now thought necessary. The miners who after ten days' immurement were at last rescued, might have lived many days more,-twice ten, almost certainly, and yet it is to be feared they would have been given up long before the first ten days had elapsed, had not sounds from them reached the ears of those who were in search. In discovery for those who are immured a search extending even to forty days would not, as we now know, be needlessly long. Moreover, it would be useful for those who are exposed to such dangers as are now under notice to be instructed in the truth that, if water can be obtained, and if that be trusted to

to the exclusion of all spirituous poisons, they may expect to live in a natural air for a period varying from three to six weeks, during which there will be no effort lost for their rescue. Such knowledge

would give both hope and fortitude to unfortunates who might otherwise be led to any rashness of despair, and might open many chances which would not occur to them in ignorance of the light that has now been thrown on the subject of human endurance under privation from solid food. When we consider what numbers of immured victims must have died from starvation because no sufficiently prolonged search for them was maintained, and when the whole horror of desolation of such a form of death is conceived, we cannot reasonably deny that man who by his own self-sacrifice has thrown in a gleam of hope, even in a mere accidental way, has not altogether suffered in vain.

V.

One or two writers out of the few who have credited Tanner with any intention of usefulness have offered an opinion that the experiment he has performed may prove beneficial as a matter of economic science, and that a good many persons may learn a great deal from it. It may fairly be admitted that the experiment is of some value in this direction. When we know how little food is really required to sustain life, we may the more readily surmise how very much more food is taken by most persons than can ever be applied usefully towards that sustainment. I have no compunction in expressing that, while the fasting enthusiast was subjecting himself to considerable danger from his abstinence, many hundreds of thousands of persons were subjecting themselves to an equal danger from indulging in excesses of foods and drinks. The only difference on their parts would be that they were not so wise as to confine their self-imposed risks to a limited period of forty days. They keep up their experiment, and, with every vessel in their bodies strained to repletion and seriously overtaxed, continue to replete and to strain the more. If we could induce, therefore, such persons to contemplate their proceedings and to strike a fair comparison between their own foolhardiness and that of Dr. Tanner, the moral they would easily draw would not be without its worth on their understanding. Unfortunately, the comparison cannot be made with effect, because the feat of excess is in the swim of fashion, while the feat of fasting is very much out of it. The first is a vice

which, by familiarity, begets favour and competition; the second is a folly which, by its oddity, begets amusement, compassion, and contempt.

VI.

While it is much to be regretted that the observations which were conducted on the fasting Doctor from day to day were not so accurate, or I had rather said so extended,—for I do not know that we have any reason to doubt the accuracy of what was observed as far as it went, there is still, in a physiological point of view, a good deal to be learned from what was observed. That under so restricted a diet the temperature of the man should to the end have remained so steady is of itself an important bit of evidence. We have been led to believe that in a very few days the process of abstaining from a sufficient supply of food, to say nothing about abstaining from food altogether, was a certain means of reducing the animal temperature. It was never surmised that water alone would lead to conditions in which the animal warmth would for many weeks remain practically sustained. That the respiration should have remained so little affected is a second equally remarkable fact; and that the muscular power should have been kept up so as to enable the starved man to walk, talk, scold, and compress the dynamometer to 82° for forty days is beyond what any physiologist living would have admitted as possible previously to the event that declares the possibility. On the veritable assumption that, in the matter of feeding, some deception has been carried out, and that, in a surreptitious way, food in small quantities, or some concentrated food, has been cleverly adminstered, these results, coupled with the unquestionable waste of tissue, and with the painful and frequent disturbance of the stomach, are quite sufficiently remarkable to demand the attention of the thoughtful physiological scholar.

The most striking physical fact of all remains, that during the whole of the fasting period the mind of the faster was unclouded, and, taking it all in all, his reasoning powers good. Whoever remembers what depressions of mind, what lapses of memory, what stages of indecision and vacuity come on when for a few hours only the body is deprived of food will wonder, not a little, that any human being could remain self-possessed and ready for argument and contention during a fast of nearly six weeks. Yet, from what is known of Dr. Tanner's experiment, and from the example I gave from my own knowledge, the possession of mental was even more conspicuous than that of physical endurance. Suppose it he urged that, in both the cases cited, the excellent sleeping faculties of the fasters kept their minds in good balance; then we do but move the difficulty one step farther back, since to sleep in a state of fast and to wake again refreshed is itself a strange order of phenomenon. In sleep there is in progress the repair of the body.

How shall there be repair when the food material out of which the repair is secured is not supplied? For a starving man to sleep and die we might be prepared; for a starving man to awake in the shadow of semi-consciousness or dementia; for a starving man to wake in the terror and excitement of delirium and rage; for any one of these conditions we might be prepared. But for such a man to wake up refreshed and, at the worst, no more than irritable and pettish, is not by any means a condition easy to be classed amongst the probable phenomena of nature. It would be sheer vanity and conceit to say that a fact of this order is not new to science and is not worthy of a place in the annals of scientific research.

VII.

The last and most obvious teaching from these fasting experiences consists in the old, but now more demonstrative, evidence of the grand part which water plays in the economy of life. The physiologist, who knows that about seventy-five per cent. of the human body is made up of water, will not wonder, so much as others will that water should possess the life-sustaining power which now is seen to belong to it. Yet he will be perplexed with the new readings, which are presented as to the mode by which it sustains for so long a period of time. He will see that under its influence a kind of peripheral digestion is established in the body itself, by which, independently of the stomach, the body can subsist for a long time on itself; first on its stored-up or reserve structures, and afterwards on its own active structures. He will infer that, by the influence of the water imbibed, the digestive juices of the stomach are kept from acting on the walls of the stomach. He will discern that, by the steady introduction of water into the blood, the blood corpuscles are kept in a state of vitality and in a condition fitted for the absorption of oxygen from the air. He will note that the minute vesicular structures of the lungs and of all the glandular organs are kept also vitalised and physically capable of function; and he will understand how, by the same agent, that water-engine the brain is sustained in activity, its cement fluid, and its cellular structure free. There will, nevertheless, be much still left to afford him food for contemplation; and, even if he thinks these fasters are not the wisest of men, he will hardly be averse to distil from them such essence of philosophy as may be legitimately extracted.

BENJAMIN WARD RICHARDSON.

E

SCIENCE NOTES.

VERYBODY is now interested in the progress of science, and

wishes to know something about it; but only those who have little else to do can follow it in the voluminous records where scientific discoveries are originally announced. Even to read the two or three English journals where these are epitomised is too much for most of us, seeing that everything available is heaped together therein; and nine-tenths or more of this accumulation is so purely technical that it is dull, dismal, and worthless to the general reader. He therefore requires the help of a judicious Mentor, who shall select from the heap the most interesting morsels, and render them easily intelligible. These notes are intended to supply this demand. They will not be paragraphs produced merely by the aid of scissors and paste; but short, simple essays carefully prepared for the Gentleman's Magazine by a writer whose long experience as a popular-science teacher enables him to form a fair estimate of popular requirements, and has trained him in the art of intelligible exposition.

The primary characteristic of natural truth, i.e. pure science, when fully understood, is simplicity, though the struggles in search of it by its discoverers may be extremely complex and difficult. An example or two will illustrate this.

Two great mathematicians, Adams and Leverrier, struggled long and arduously with the difficulties of most complex calculations in order to determine the cause of certain deviations of the planet Uranus from the path it ought theoretically to have followed. They finally determined that these irregularities are due to the gravitation of another world beyond: they told the owners of suitable telescopes where to find it, and it was found accordingly. Thus the discovery of the planet Neptune demanded a vast amount of technical mathematical skill; but, when discovered, the great fact became clearly open to all.

The Astronomer Royal and his assistants have been working for some years past in reducing the costly and difficult observations of the last transit of Venus. None but highly-trained mathematicians