This rheumatism, pneumonia, diabetes, and some kidney diseases and liver
affections are often the result of persistent nervous disturbance is now
held. That a high temperature (the highest recorded) has resulted from
injuries of the spinal cord, and where the influence of microzymes is
excluded, is not a matter of question. In one instance, the temperature
reached 122 deg. F., and remained for seven weeks between 108 deg. and 118 deg. F.
The patient was a lady; the result was recovery. Hence it cannot be fever
which kills or produces rapid softening of the heart and other organs in
fatal cases of typhoid. Fever, so far as it consists in elevation of
temperature, can be a simple neurosis.

Many other items of progress might be presented did time permit,
particularly in the treatment of nervous affections, but this I leave for
another occasion.

* * * * *

SCARING THE BABY OUT.

Dr. Grangier, surgeon in the French army, writes from Algeria: "A few
days after the occupation of Brizerte, when the military authorities had
forbidden, under the severest penalties, the discharge of firearms within
the town, the whole garrison was awakened at three o'clock one morning by
the tremendous explosion of a heavily loaded gun in the neighborhood of
the ramparts; a guard of soldiers rushed into the house from whence the
sound had come, and found a woman lying on the floor with a newly born
babe between her thighs. The father of the child stood over his wife with
the smoking musket still in his hand, but his intentions in firing the
gun had been wholly medical, and not hostile to the French troops. The
husband discovered that his wife had been in labor for thirty-six hours.
Labor was slow and the contractions weak and far apart. He had thought it
advisable to provoke speedy contraction, and, following the Algerian
custom to _scare the baby_ out, he had fired the musket near his wife's
ear; instantanously the accouchement was terminated. After being
imprisoned twenty-four hours, the Arab was released."--_Cincinnati
Lancet._

* * * * *

"ELASTIC LIMIT" IN METAL.

The _Engineering and Mining Journal_ raises the question whether steel,
which is becoming so popular a substitute for wrought iron, will, when it
is subjected to continuous strain in suspension bridges and other similar
structures, do as well as iron has proved that it can. Recent tests of
se