Various

“ Boccaccio’s impressionable nature was deeply moved. His life had been far from virtuous; in his 105 writings he had frequently sinned against the rules of morality, and worse still, he had attacked with bitter satire the institutions and servants of holy mother church. Terrified by the approach of immediate death, he resolved to sell his library, abandon literature, and devote the remainder of his life to penance and religious exercise. To this effect he wrote to Petrarch. We possess the poet’s answer; it is a masterpiece of writing, and what is more, a proof of tenderest friendship. ”

“ It is needless to dwell, in the way either of acceptance or rejection, on the very few occasions in which his outward life seemed to him to come into contact with the invisible world. The apparition of the pail of gold to the herd boy on the Landskrone, the visit of the mysterious stranger to the young apprentice, the fascination of the luminous sheen, reflected from a common pewter dish, which first, in 1600, gave an intuitive turn to his meditations, the heavenly music which filled his ears as he lay dying—none of these matters is connected organically with the secret of his special power. ”

“ A great effort should be made to lift the blind from pauperism. As soon as pupils enter a school, all semblance of pauper origin should be removed. They must be inspired with a desire for independence and a belief in its possibility. In the public mind blindness has been so long and closely associated with dependence and pauperism that schools for the blind, even the most progressive, have been regarded hitherto as asylums rather than educational establishments. A sad mistake in the training of the blind is the lack of an earnest effort to improve their social condition. ”

“ BLEACHING, the process of whitening or depriving objects of colour, an operation incessantly in activity in nature by the influence of light, air and moisture. The art of bleaching, of which we have here to treat, consists in inducing the rapid operation of whitening agencies, and as an industry it is mostly directed to cotton, linen, silk, wool and other textile fibres, but it is also applied to the whitening of paper-pulp, bees’-wax and some oils and other substances. ”

“ In the second book Philosophy presents to Boetius Fortune, who is made to state to him the blessings he has enjoyed, and after that proceeds to discuss with him the kind of blessings that fortune can bestow, which are shown to be unsatisfactory and uncertain. In the third book Philosophy promises to lead him to true happiness, which is to be found in God alone, for since God is the highest good, and the highest good is true happiness, God is true happiness. Nor can real evil exist, for since God is all-powerful, and since he does not wish evil, evil must be non-existent. ”

“ In all living organisms, except the most minute, only a minimum number of cells can come into immediate contact with the general world, whence is to be drawn the food supply for the whole organism. Hence those cells—and they are by far the most numerous—which do not lie on the food-absorbing surface, must gain their nutriment by some indirect means. Further, each living cell produces waste products whose accumulation would speedily prove injurious to the cell, hence they must be constantly removed from its immediate neighbourhood and indeed from the organism as a whole. ”

“ The message of the monk Petrarch is evidently inclined to treat simply as pious fraud, without, however, actually committing himself to that opinion. “No monk is required to tell thee of the shortness and precariousness of human life. Of the advice received accept what is good; abandon worldly cares, conquer thy passions, and reform thy soul and life of degraded habits. But do not give up the studies which are the true food of a healthy mind.” Boccaccio seems to have acted on this valuable advice. ”

“ BLASTING, the process of rending or breaking apart a solid body, such as rock, by exploding within it or in contact with it some explosive substance. The explosion is accompanied by the sudden development of gas at a high temperature and under a tension sufficiently great to overcome the resistance of the enclosing body, which is thus shattered and disintegrated. Before the introduction of explosives, rock was laboriously excavated by hammer and chisel, or by the ancient process of “fire-setting,” i.e. building a fire against the rock, which, on cooling, splits and flakes off. ”

“ Although Boehme’s philosophy is essentially theological, and his theology essentially philosophical, one would hardly describe him as a philosophical theologian; and, indeed, his position is not one in which either the philosopher or the theologian finds it easy to make himself completely at home. The philosopher finds no trace in Boehme of a conception of God which rests its own validity on an accord with the highest canons of reason or of morals ”

“ Coming to the northern waters, as with men, so with boats, we meet with a totally different type. Instead of the smooth exterior of the carvel-build, we have the more rugged form of clinker-built craft with great beam, and raking sterns and stems, and a wide flare forward. In the most northern waters the strakes of the sea-going boats are wide and of considerable thickness, of oak or fir, often compacted with wooden trenails, strong and fit to do battle with the rough seas and rough usage which they have to endure. ”

“ The musical instruction, in its several branches of harmony, pianoforte, organ and vocal culture, must be addressed to the mind, not merely to the ear. This is the only possible method by which musical training can be made of practical use to the blind. The blind music teacher or organist must have a well-disciplined mind, capable of analysing and dealing with music from an intellectual point of view. If the mental faculties have not been developed and thoroughly disciplined, the blind musician, however well he may play or sing, will be a failure as a teacher. ”

“ After death the amount of blood sometimes seems to be increased, and sometimes, as in “pernicious anaemia,” it is certainly diminished. But the high counts of red corpuscles which are occasionally reported as evidence of plethora or increase of the total blood are really only indications of concentration of the fluid except in certain rare cases. It is necessary, therefore, in examining blood diseases, to confine ourselves to the study of the blood-unit, which is always taken as the cubic millimetre, without reference to the number of units in the body. ”

“ The later dramatists gradually abandoned that rigorous difference which should always be preserved between the cadence of verse and prose, and the example of Ford, who endeavoured to revive the old severity of blank verse, was not followed. But just as the form was sinking into dramatic desuetude, it took new life in the direction of epic, and found its noblest proficient in the person of John Milton. The most intricate and therefore the most interesting blank verse which has been written is that of Milton in the great poems of his later life. ”

“ Any condition leading to disturbance of the function of the bladder, such as enlargement of the prostate, stricture of the urethra, stone, or injury, may cause cystitis by preparing the way for bacillary invasion. The bacilli of tuberculosis and of typhoid fever may set up cystitis by coming down into the bladder from the kidneys with the urine, or they reach it by the blood-stream, or invade it by the urethra. Another way of cystitis being set up is by the introduction of the germs of suppuration by a catheter or bougie sweeping them in from the urethra ”

“ When an enlightened, civilized and progressive nation quietly and passively, year after year, permits a multitude of its people unnecessarily to become blind, and more especially when one-quarter of these are infants, the reason for such a startling condition of affairs demands explanation. ”

“ These ideas in regard to philology Böckh set forth in a Latin oration delivered in 1822 (Gesammelte kleine Schriften, i.) . In his speech at the opening of the congress of German philologists in 1850, he defined philology as the historical construction of the entire life—therefore, of all forms of culture and all the productions of a people in its practical and spiritual tendencies. He allows that such a work is too great for any one man; but the very infinity of subjects is the stimulus to the pursuit of truth, and men strive because they have not attained (ib. ii.) ”

“ Each community had its own twelve “apostles,” and women could be raised to the rank of “elect.” The Bogomils wore garments like mendicant friars and were known as keen missionaries, travelling far and wide to propagate their doctrines. Healing the sick and conjuring the evil spirit, they traversed different countries and spread their apocryphal literature along with some of the books of the Old Testament, deeply influencing the religious spirit of the nations, and preparing them for the Reformation. They sowed the seeds of a rich religious popular literature in the East as well as in the West. ”

“ The blind man can do as good work as the man who can see; but as a rule he does not work so quickly, and if the man who is not blind has to use every exertion to support himself and his family, the blind man to do the same requires some special help, without which he will either not be able to compete, or will have to lead a life of great privation.
“The first difficulty when a blind pupil is starting in life is to provide himself with the necessary tools and material. These the institution supplies to him, and continues through life to afford him moral and material help ”

“ Hence the main number of the cells of the organism must depend upon some mechanism by which the waste products can be carried away from them to that group of cells whose duty it is to modify them, or discharge them from the body. These two ends are attained by the aid of a circulating fluid, a fluid which is constantly flowing past every cell of the body. From it the cells extract the food materials they require for their sustenance, and into it they discharge the waste materials resulting from their activity. ”

“ In acute anaemias, such as those associated with septicaemia, there is no doubt that blood destruction plays the principal part. But if the cause of anaemia is a chronic one, a gastric cancer, for instance, though there may possibly be an increased amount of destruction of corpuscles in some cases, and though there is often loss by haemorrhage, the cancer interferes with nutrition, the blood is impoverished and does not nourish the erythroblasts in the marrow sufficiently, and the new corpuscles which are turned out are few and poor in haemoglobin. ”

“ The concentration of the haemoglobin in the corpuscles attains its maximum in the mammal and the bird. Since the haemoglobin is practically the same from whatever animal it is obtained and can only combine with the same amount of oxygen, the oxygen-capacity of the blood of any vertebrate is in direct proportion to the amount of haemoglobin it contains. Therefore we see that as we ascend the scale in the vertebrate series the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood rises. This increase was a natural preliminary condition for the progress of evolution. ”

“ Again, many instances are known in which two distant tissues communicate with one another by means of chemical messengers, bodies termed hormones (ὁρμάειν, to stir up) , which are produced by one group of cells, and sent to the other group to excite them to activity. Here, also, the path by which such messengers travel is the blood stream. A further and most important manner in which the circulating fluid is utilized in the life of an animal is seen in the way in which it is employed in protecting the body should it be invaded by micro-organisms. ”

“ Hence we see that first and foremost we have to regard the blood as a food-carrier to all the cells of the body; in the second place as the vehicle carrying away most if not all the waste products; in a third direction, it is acting as a means for transmitting chemical substances manufactured in one tissue to distant cells of the body for whose nutrition or excitation they may be essential ”

“ The changes in the blood in disease are probably as numerous and varied as the diseases which attack the body, for the blood is not only the medium of respiration, but also of nutrition, of defence against organisms and of many other functions, none of which can be affected without corresponding alterations occurring in the circulating fluid. ”

“ The conditions that prevail in the Black Sea are very different from those of the Mediterranean or any other sea. The existence of sulphuretted hydrogen in great quantities below 100 fathoms, the extensive chemical precipitation of calcium carbonate, the stagnant nature of its deep waters, and the absence of deep-sea life are conditions which make it impossible to discuss it along with the physical and biological conditions of the Mediterranean proper.
The depths of the Black Sea are lifeless, higher organic life not being known to exist below 100 fathoms. ”

“ In children, in whom there is a rapid disintegration of nitrogenized tissues, a uric acid calculus in escaping from the bladder may block the urethra and give rise to sudden retention of urine. On introducing a metal “sound,” the surgeon may strike the stone, and if it happens to be near the bladder he may push it back and subsequently remove it by crushing. But if it has made its way some distance along the urethra, so that he can feel it from the outside, he should remove it by a clean incision. ”