Various

“ As Emerson well says, "He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles, just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head."—Phil. ”

“ It is a long time since Grotius wrote, "The study of the human mind is the noblest branch of medicine;" and we realize to-day that it is the noblest study of man, regardless of vocation. Aye! it is the imperative study of our generation and of those who are to follow us, if we would continue, as we wish to be, the conservators of the good and great, and promoters of advancing capability for great and good deeds in our humanity. ”

“ Seen in the soft clime of Italy in all its native vigor, the Stone pine is always majestic and strangely impressive to a northern eye, whether in dense forests, as near Florence, in more open masses, as at Ravenna, in picturesque groups, as about Rome, or in occasional single trees, such as may be seen throughout the country, but rather more frequently toward the coast. ”

“ The awarding of a patent in fact weighs for nothing in a judge's mind as proving its originality. The Commissioner of Patents is really exhausting the energies of the Office employees over a multitude of searches that have no standing whatever in court, and that no lawyer would accept as any guarantee of novelty of invention. If every inventor would search the records for his own benefit, we should then have twenty thousand examiners instead of the present small number. ”

“ The aim of the breeder is to not only produce an animal which shall in its own person possess the highest type of excellence sought, but shall have the power to transmit to its offspring those qualities of value possessed by himself. A breeder may, by chance, produce a superior animal, or it may be the result of carefully laid plans and artfully controlling the forces of nature and subjecting them to his will. ”

“ It is the insanity in chronic form which escapes asylum care and custody except in its exacerbations; it is the insanity of organism which gives so much of the erratic and unstable to society, in its manifestations of mind and morals; it is the form of unstable mental organism which, like an unstrung instrument jangling out of tune and harsh, when touched in a manner to elicit in men of stable organisms only concord of sweet, harmonious sounds ”

“ If, however, we hereafter make no examinations for novelty, an inventor is obliged to either make such a search for himself—with all the disadvantages of unfamiliarity with the best methods, inaccessibility to records, and incurring immensely more work than is required of the Patent Office examiner, who has everything pertaining thereto at his fingers' ends—or blindly pay his fees and take his patent under the impression that he is the first inventor, and run every risk of being beaten in the courts should any one essay to contest his claims ”

“ Therefore he who would prove himself an artist in moulding his herd at will, must not only bring together into his herd many choice lines of goodness, but must ever seek, by kind treatment and good care, to change their qualities for the better, and by right selection and careful breeding so impress these changes for the better as to make them hereditary. If this course is persistently adhered to, the stock will gradually improve, retaining the good qualities of the ancestry, and developing new ones, generation by generation, under the hand of the artist breeder. ”

“ Direct mechanical restraint for the insane, save to avert an act of violence not otherwise preventable, is never justifiable. The hand should never be manacled if the head can be so influenced as to stay it, and we should try to stay the hand through steadying the head.
Every place for these unfortunates should provide for them ample room and congenial employment, whether profitable to the State or not, and the labor should be induced, not enforced, and always timed and suited to their malady. A variety of interesting occupations tends to divert from delusional introspection. ”

“ A valuable herd may be entirely ruined by a change of food and care; for those conditions which have conspired to produce a certain type must be continued, or the type changes, it may be for the better or it may be for the worse, since stock very readily adapt themselves to their surroundings; and it is just here that so many are disappointed in buying blood stock from a successful breeder; for a successful breeder is necessarily a good feeder and a kind handler, and stock may give good results in his hands, and, if removed to starvation and harshness, quickly degenerate. ”

“ Changes in temperature occurring on a large scale in our atmosphere, occurring in these gas jets, in our fires, in the axles of machinery, and in thousands of other places, are so familiar that we have ceased to wonder at them. ”

“ Recognizing the fact that the patent records of all countries, as well as cognate publications, are rapidly on the increase—and particularly in this country—making an examination for novelty a continuously increasing task, and that the time must come when such an examination cannot be made at all conclusively without a vastly increased amount of labor, from the very magnitude of the operation, it is nevertheless true that this difficulty menaces the inventor to a much greater extent, if imposed upon him to make, than it can ever possibly do an institution like the Patent Office. ”

“ Simple sequestration of the insane man is an outrage upon him and upon our humanity. "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them," is the divine precept, which, if we follow it as we ought, will lead us to search for our fallen comrades in the alms-houses and penal institutions and reformatories, and sometimes in the outhouses or cellars of private homes, to our shame, where errors of judgment or cruelty have placed them, and to transfer them to places of larger liberty and hopes of happiness and recovery. ”

“ Far, indeed, are we from the practice of not more than a hundred years ago, when it was not thought improper to make the shell of a steam engine boiler of wooden staves. The engineer of to-day, in a country like England, refrains from using wood. He cannot cast it into form, he cannot weld it. Glue (even if marine) would hardly be looked upon as an efficient substitute for a sound weld; and the fact is, that it is practically impossible to lay hold of timber when employed for tensile purposes so as to obtain anything approaching to the full tensile strength. ”

“ The free sunlight and the fresh air belong as much to him in his changed mental estate as to you or me, and more, because his affliction needs their invigorating power, and the man who would chain, in this enlightened age, an insane man in a dungeon, because he is diseased and troublesome or dangerous, would be unworthy the name of human. Effective restraint may be employed without the use of either iron manacles or dismal light and air excluding dungeons.
The insane man is one of our comrades who has fallen mentally maimed in the battle of life. ”

“ Five hundred and fifty thousand tons of iron, all shaped, are taken from the forge every day. To reach such a result it requires no less than 3,000 workmen and a motive power of 7,000 horses.
But do not be appalled at the cost of the coal, for, thanks to ingenious processes, the heat lost from the furnaces nearly suffices to run the boilers. If we remark that a power of one horse does in one hour the equivalent of a man's labor per day, we conclude that these machines (which run night and day) represent an army of 160,000 men that lends its gratuitous aid to the workmen of the forge. ”

“ Temperature in heat is analogous to potential in electricity. As soon as adjacent bodies are at different temperatures, we have the phenomena which reveal to us the existence of heat. As soon as adjacent bodies have different electrical potentials, we have the phenomena which reveal the existence of electricity. As soon as adjacent regions in the air are at different pressures, we have phenomena which reveal the existence of air. ”

“ If a neutral body, that is to say a body having no vibration of its own, be immersed in the fluid and within the field of vibration, phenomena are produced exactly analogous to the magnetic and diamagnetic phenomena produced by the action of a magnet upon soft iron or bismuth, its apparently magnetic or diamagnetic properties being determined by the specific gravity of the neutral body as compared to that of the medium in which it is immersed. If the neutral body be lighter than the medium, it exhibits the magnetic induction of iron with respect to polarity, but is nevertheless repelled ”

“ A truly philanthropic sentiment is most potent for good in the power of knowledge, and may be made most powerful for evil through misconception of or inadequate comprehension of facts. As we grow in aspirations after the highest welfare of the insane, let us widen our knowledge of the real nature of insanity and the necessities for its amelioration, prevention, and cure. ”

“ For the preparation of metal for cannon and armor-plates Le Creusot is thoroughly equipped. The iron is produced on the premises from the purest imported ores, and the manufacture of the steel is carried on by the most approved application of the open-hearth system with the Siemens furnace; the chemical and mechanical tests are such as to satisfy the most exacting demands of careful government officials; and the executive ability apparent in all the departments and the evident condition of discipline that pervades the whole establishment inspire confidence in the productions of the labor. ”

“ I am aware of the danger there is of making a serious mistake, when one excludes any matter which at the moment appears to be of but a trivial character. For who knows how speedily some development may show that the judgment which had guided the selection was entirely erroneous, and that that which had been passed over was in truth the germ of a great improvement? ”

“ We agree that all money received by the Patent Office should be applied to its legitimate end. It seems to us a great injustice to make one generation of patentees accumulate money in the Treasury for the benefit of some coming generation. Application of the whole of each year's fees to the expediting of that year's business would be simple justice. But we do not lose sight of our main point, that were the inventor unable to make a satisfactory search, it could be done for him by private parties better and cheaper than it is now done in the Office. ”

“ Firth, worked by compressed air, reduce to a minimum the waste of coal, relieve the workman of a most fatiguing labor in a constrained position, and save him from the danger to which he is exposed in the hand operation. It is a matter of deep regret on many grounds, but especially as showing how little the true principles of political economy are realized by working men, who are usually well informed on many other points, that the commercial failure of these machines is due to their opposition. ”

“ Far from injuring the aspect of the great arteries of our metropolis, the viaduct, as it has been conceived, will contribute toward giving them a still more imposing look. If the beautiful is, as has been said, the expression of the useful, an elevated railway, well conceived, may be beautiful. The project of a subterranean railway is attended with great drawbacks, not only as regards the great expense that it would necessitate, but also the difficulties of constructing it. ”

“ One known and acknowledged insane person to every five hundred sane persons, and among those are unreckoned numbers of unstably endowed and too mildly mannered lunatics to require public restraint, but none the less dangerous to the perpetuation of the mental stability of the race, is an appalling picture of fact for philanthropic conservators of the race to contemplate. ”

“ Du Fay, of Paris, discovered what he called two kinds of electricity. He found that a glass rod rubbed with silk will repel another glass rod similarly rubbed, but that the silk would attract a rubbed glass rod. We express the facts in the well-known law that like electricities repel each other, and unlike attract. For a long time the nature of the distinctions between the two electricities was not understood. It was found later that when the two bodies are rubbed together they become oppositely electrified, and that the two electricities are always generated in equal quantity ”

“ On the contrary, an engineer shows his ability by the choice of those materials which are the very best for his purpose, having regard, however, to the relative facilities of carriage, to the power of supply in sufficiently large quantities, to the ease with which they can be worked up or built in, and to the cost. ”

“ Dinocrates, I grant the beauty of your project; it pleases me, but I think that any one who should take it into his head to establish a colony in the place you propose would run the risk of being taxed with want of foresight; for, just as a child can neither feed nor develop without the milk of a nurse, so a city cannot increase without fertile fields, have a large population without plenty of food, and allow its inhabitants to subsist without rich harvests ”

“ We should give him a home worthy of our own sovereign selves, and such as would suit us were we providing for ourselves, with the knowledge we have of the needs of this affliction, pending its approach to us.
That his home should be as unirritating and restful to him as possible it should be unprison-like always, and only be an imprisonment when the violent phases of his malady imperatively demand restraint. An hour of maniacal excitement does not justify a month of chains. Mechanical restraint is a remedy of easy resort, but the fettered man frets away strength essential to his recovery. ”

“ The chronic insane are entitled to our care, not to our neglect, and to all the comforts they earned while battling with us, when in their best mental estate, for their common welfare and ours.
Almshouses and neglected outhouses are not proper places for them. They are entitled to our protection and to be so cared for, if we cannot cure them, as that they may not do those things, to their own harm or the harm of the race, which they would not do if they were sound in mind. ”

“ In case of our gas cylinders, the gas tends to leak out of the vessel where the pressure is great into the vessel where it is small. The heat tends to leak out of a body of high temperature into the colder one, or the cold tends to go in the opposite direction. Similarly, the plus electricity tends to flow from the body having a high potential, to the body having a low potential, or the minus electricity tends to go in the opposite direction. ”

“ There is nothing more insidious than the spirit of conformity, and nothing more quickly paralyzes the best parts of a man. A gleam of truth illuminates his mind, and forthwith he proceeds to compare it with the prevailing tone of his community or his set. ”

“ If we rub these two bodies together, the potential of the two is no longer the same. We do not know which one has become greater, and in this respect our knowledge of electricity is less complete than of heat. We assume that the gutta percha has become negative. If we now leave these bodies in contact, the potential of the cat's skin will diminish and that of the gutta percha will increase until they have again reached a common potential—that of the earth. ”

“ We have now demonstrated what great advantages the city of Paris and her population might derive from the establishing of movable markets.
It is easy to see that well established structures of this kind would render great services in small towns also. They might entirely replace stationary iron markets, the high cost of which often causes municipalities to preserve their old, inconvenient, and unhealthy structures. As a general thing, market is held but once or twice a week in small towns. In the interior the structure could be taken apart, and the place rendered free. ”

“ For this purpose an enormous ditch has been dug in which there is a cylindrical furnace, and alongside of it there is a well of oil. The car brings the cannon to the edge of the ditch, and a steam crane performs the operation of tempering with as much ease as we would temper a knife blade.
In the presence of such engines of attack it was necessary to think of defense. The hammer that forges the cannon also gives us the armor plate to brave it. This time the ingot is flattened under the blows of the hammer, and even takes the rounded form of the stern, if it be so desired. ”

“ Sometimes we meet with breeders whose only aim in their stock seem to be to produce animals that shall be entitled to registry. To such I have little to say, as their work is comparatively easy, and has but few hindrances to success; but to those breeders who are possessed of an ideal type of perfection, which they are striving to impress upon their stock, I have a few words to say upon the hindrances they may find in the way of satisfactory results. ”