such are no longer the rule, as once they were the rule, and this means a mighty step forward for the race; we repeat, for the race, for as a stream cannot rise above its source, so, practically, cannot a race, above the mothers of it.

There is one explanation which, more than any other, gives the reason of the beneficent change we have noted; women are beginning to live out of doors. Formerly, the idea that home was woman's sphere, involved the very literal correlative idea that women were better indoors than out, in every possible sense of the phrase. Those were the days when recreation for girls meant a genteel game of cribbage; when summer vacations for women meant stooping over fancy work on a shaded hotel piazza, or a decorous and leisurely saunter, properly veiled, down a dusty road. Exercise for the school-girl meant a chaperoned recess-walk of two blocks; perhaps a few more or less mincing motions with a six-ounce dumbell. Now exercise for girls means thorough gymnasium-work of every kind; the vaulting-bar, the running-track; the well-directed development of lung by correct breathing; the securing a fine and healthful carriage by a wellpoised walk. Now summer recreation for girls means the tennis court, the mountain tramp, the long pull at the oars; in a word means practically what it means for her brothers, and means the same beneficent result it means for her brothers. A common-sense girl, with a common-sense mother and a commonsense family doctor, will be in no danger of trespassing on sexlimitations in such vigorous physical life. On the contrary, she will greatly help to do away with sex-limitations, and eventually be as little hampered by them as her savage sisters of the wigwam and the long, forced march. Such free out-of-door life preaches certain truths to women, which on the lips of reformers, women have passed smiling by. Absolutely unconverted by the lecturer on dress-reform, the woman who finds that corseted and shoulder-bound, she invites defeat for herself in a tennis-tournament, makes short shrift for fashion when it stands. in the way of wholesome ambition. One hill-climb in French heels is the most convincing of sermons as to what boots are best friends with nature. Right life, here as elsewhere, both teaches and compels right methods of living.

In mind and soul, as well as in body, woman is learning to live out of doors. More and more, as large, impersonal interests and noble ambitions call into play faculties long dormant, there are vanishing from woman's face the lines of petty and poor anxieties and fretfulnesses; the glance grows freer, the smile more frequent. The exercise of intellect, thought and reason are doing for her higher self, what unlimited tennis and sunshine are doing for her lower self. The standard of womanhood is rising year by year, in those countries where women are being taught and helped to live out of doors. There are few truths better worth pondering and better worth acting upon, by the parent and the physician, the moralist, the legislator and the sociologist.

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

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THE HABIT OF "CONVEYING" homoeopathic ideas, remedies and doses from new-school practice to old, said conveying being artlessly ignored as such, and the things conveyed, announced, and heralded as "discoveries," is, it seems, a habit not confined to one side of the sea. In the admirable address lately delivered by the President of the British Homœopathic Congress, Dr. Ramsbotham, he alluded to this habit, with a pungency well worth quoting.

"The diminution in our numbers," he says, alluding to the fact that fewer names than formerly appear in the directory of homoeopathic physicians, "the diminution in our numbers points not so much to the decadence of homoeopathy as to a leavening of the general body of the profession with its principles. Signs of such a leavening are discernible.

"While these pages were passing through the press I received so apt an illustration of this leavening process from Dr. Bryce, of Edinburgh, that I obtained his permission to mention it. Learning from a patient who consulted him for indigestion and insomnia, that he had been under the care of an allopathic practitioner in the South of England, he not unnaturally desired to see the prescriptions which had been given; when with equal amazement and amusement he found the insomnia had been

treated by coffea cruda 3, and the indigestion by nux vomica 6. One wonders if his very peculiar form of orthodoxy permits this gentleman to join his brethren in abusing homœopaths and their dilutions!

"Who among us does not know some one or more men who are homœopaths in all but the name? Who can have failed to observe the frequency of the adoption by the old school of drugs which have either been introduced into the materia medica, or rescued from oblivion and undeserved neglect by homœopaths? This open and undisguised transference must have been brought under the notice of even the most inattentive observer, by the circulars of various drug-dispensing firms, even if he has never dipped into the pages of The Extra Pharmacopeia, and has refrained from perusing any contemporary literature save that which emanates from our own side. Were we to fix our attention solely on signs such as these, we might be tempted to imagine that the leaven was working rapidly, that the approximation of the discordant elements was becoming very close, that the reunion of the two schools was near at hand. But when we see this measure of free trade accompanied too often on the part of the consumer by a contemptuous ignoring of the producer, by a careful concealment of the source whence was derived the knowledge how to use the material thus 'conveyed,' or even by positive assurances that the source was not a tainted one, such imaginings are apt to receive a rude shock.

"The latest instance of this unacknowledged 'conveyancing' which has come under my notice is too amusing to be passed by without remark. In an article on 'The Cholera Scourge,' which appeared in the Yorkshire Post of 30th August last, Plain Medical Advice' was given both as to preventive and remedial measures, Cassell's Family Physician, Longman's Dictionary of Medicine (edited by Sir R. Quain), and Macnamara's History of Asiatic Cholera being quoted as authorities. The remedial measures recommended are, to 'give four drops of essence of camphor every ten minutes for an hour, or until there is some improvement;' with the addition that in the later stages of cholera, when there is much collapse, arsenic may advanta geously replace camphor. The very treatment which, in 1854,

the Royal College of Physicians tried to burke, by refusing to class the returns of those who had adopted it along with the medical returns prepared by order of Parliament, and presented to the House of Commons, fearing - probably with justicethat it would compromise the value and utility of their averages of cure,' is now put forward authoritatively, but without acknowledgment of its source, as the treatment of cholera."

And thus the good work goes on; and the gentlemen to whom the honor of their profession is so dear that it cannot be smirched by association with homoeopathists, borrow from homœopathy, without credit or acknowledgment, much that makes, most conspicuously, for their therapeutic advance.

A MEMORABLY GOOD DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC MIND is that given by Prof. Karl Pearson, in his recently-published Grammar of Science, and quoted and commented upon in an editorial note in the October Popular Science Monthly.

"The classification of facts,' says Prof. Pearson, and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification — judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind is peculiarly the scope and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to aim at selfelimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own. . . . The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is. the peculiarity of the professional scientist.' Not only is this method not that of the average man, but its very existence is scarcely surmised by him. His method-if such it can be called of arriving at conclusions is to fasten his attention on a few salient facts, and to interpret them according to his own prepossessions and interests. If asked to take a point of view from which, perhaps, other facts would become salient, or to divest himself of self-interest as a canon of interpretation, he will in general decline; in many cases, indeed, he will be totally incapable of responding to the invitation. The idea of requir

ing a wide range of facts as a basis for induction, of checking the result of a first survey or examination by that of a second, third, fourth, or tenth, and of treating self-interest or previously formed opinion as a disturbing influence from which the judg ment is to be kept as free as possible, is one which long ages of struggle with the problems of nature have at length bequeathed to the scientific workers of to-day, but which has no lodgment, and but slight recognition, in the minds of the multitude. Prof. Pearson is, however, of opinion that an instruction in scientific method might be very generally imparted, and that its effect on the mind of the ensuing generation would be marked. He considers, very rightly, that a scientific frame of mind is an essential of good citizenship, seeing that it is that frame of mind alone which leads a man to look beyond proximate phenomena, and above all, to put aside personal bias. It is the peculiarity, as he well observes, of scientific method that, when once it has become a habit of mind, that mind converts all facts whatsoever into science. Good intentions are not enough to make a good citizen; a man may with the best of intentions, and even at great self-sacrifice, set himself in direct opposition to the best interests of the State. The trouble in such a case is that the man lacks knowledge, and, like an ignorant physician, either diagnosticates badly the evils he would remedy, or, if his diag noses chance to be right—which is very unlikely applies the wrong cure,''

What is here so trenchantly said of citizenship, is equally as true of professional work. So applied, Prof. Pearson's words are pregnant with meaning to medical students, graduate and undergraduate, and cannot be laid too closely to heart.

THE OCTOBER MEETING OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HOMŒOPATHIC MEDICAL SOCIETY was a memorable one in the history of that body. Covering as it did parts of two days, and bringing the members together at several social lunches, as well as at the dinner- a very feast of good will!-with which, on Wednesday evening, the 12th, the exercises closed, it afforded unique opportunity for friendly intercourse no less than for scientific colloquy. On the opening night, the 11th, the lecture.