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Netos of Interest Gathered Here and There
John Wanamaker superintends, as the world
knows, one of the largest Sunday schools in the
world—Bethany Sunday school, in Philadelphia. It
is said of Mr. Wanamaker that one Sunday he de
livered before the infant class of Bethany a brief
but eloquent address on the lesson. At the end he
said: ‘‘And, now. is there any question that any
little boy or girl would like to ask me?” A girl
of eight or nine years rose. “Well, Martha, what
is it?” said the supeiintendent, smiling on the tot
in kindly fashion. “Please, Mr. Wanamaker,” said
the little tot, “what is the price of those large wax
dolls in your window?”
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“It has been long observed.” says Dr. Samuel
Johnson, “the an atheist has no just reason for en
deavoring conversions; and yet none harass those
minds which they can influence with more impor
tunity of solicitation to adopt their opinions.”
This importunity he ascribes to the desire of the
infidel “to supply, by authority, the deficiency of
his arguments, and to make his cause less invid
ious by showing numbers on his side.” The same
is true of those who, even while professing to be
ministers of the Gospel, deny and decry the au
thority of the holy Scriptures. They must vocifer
ate their notions, and try to persuade men to their
view, even when they know, by their own empti
ness of soul, how terrible a void is wrought by de
stroying faith in the Bible as God’s Word. —The
Examiner.
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The Seben Raillvay Kings of America.
Os railway presidents in the United States there
are hundreds. Os railway kings there are but
seven. The president is the executive chief of a
single line. The king is the financial ruler of a
system of affiliated lines. He may not be even an
officer of any one line and yet be the king of the
system. Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, for instance,
does not hold any important railroad office, yet he
is the monarch over one-fifth of the mileage of the
United States. Ex-Judge William H. Moore, the
king of the Rock Island system, is only a director
of the road. Ability to run a railroad is one thing.
Ability to finance a railroad or a system of rail
roads is another thing.
The seven kings in the order of their impor
tance are: J. Pierpont Morgan, Edward H. Har
riman, William K. Vanderbilt, Henry C. Frick,
James J. Hill, George J. Gould and William H.
Moore. Their domain comprises more than 161,000
miles of railroad track with earnings of $1,776,-
000,000 a year. Outside of their seven dominions
are' to be found but 25 per cent of the total mileage
of the country, and but 15 per cent of the rail
road earnings. This nation of forty-five sovereign
states seems to be entering into a struggle with’
these seven kings and their army of officers and
employes. —Current Literature.
Cigarette Smoking.
The worst appetite creator is the cigarette. The
cigarette is the alphabet by which the boy learns
to read the primer of intemperance. Let city
ordinances and state statutes be passed killing the
woful white cylinder, and the boy intemperates
would be reduced to a minimum. The writer’s ex
perience in settlement work leads him to feel that
fully nine-tenths of the boy drinkers began their
career in contact with “the weed” in some form;
and usually at the dark end of the cigarette.
Mr. W. L. Bodine, superintendent of compul
sory education in Chicago, in a recent address said:
“I have sent 1,015 boys to the Parental School for
truancy, and 80 per cent of these have been cigar
ette smokers.”
The superintendent of the National Anti-Cigar
ette League, presumably from full information,
gives out this statement: “One thousand, two hun
dred to one thousand, five hundred boys every day
are said to begin smoking cigarettes, so rapidly is
the habit spreading all over the country. This
means that an army of boys is laying the founda
tion for much trouble and suffering for themselves
The Golden Age for May 23, 1907.
and for their families and friends.” This fact also
may be quoted: “Whiskey drinking, cocaine, opium
and other drugs frequently follow indulgence in
cigarettes. Personal impurity of the most loath
some kind is often found with the cigarette habit
and the two together cause many sad cases of in
sanity.”
Cigarette smoking is associated with crime. Mr.
11. W. Thurston, chief probation officer of the Chi
cago Juvenile Court, says: “Nearly every delin
quent boy coming before the Juvenile Court is a
cigarette smoker. ’ ’
Thousands of business men in Chicago will not
employ a boy who smokes cigarettes. Dr. David
Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford Univer
sity, says: “Boys who smoke cigarettes are like
wormy apples. They drop long before harvest.
They rarely make failures in after life because they
do not have any after life.” Robert J. Burdette,
in his characteristic way, puts it thus: “A boy
who smokes cigarettes is like a cypher with the
rim knocked off.”—Mr. Edward Raffety, in The
Standard.
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Raising the Standard oj Medicine.
One of the professions in which an ignoramus and
pretender can work mischief and disaster is med
icine. Even now in an age distinctly scientific we
are not far removed from the age of empiricism in
this ancient science. Antiquity and the middle ages
in the history of the white race, not to speak of
the record of barbarism, do not alone comprise the
story of man’s attempts sincerely to benefit his
fellow man, or, for the sake of the practitioner
only, to delude him into the belief that by swal
lowing and doing certain things his wretch
ed body would be freed of ills. Long after
the light of the classic renaissance had
spread culture and glory over Europe so-called
doctors treated the sick in fashions now in
conceivable. The quacks of that period still have
their successors, gross, rampant, blatant, success
ful successors, who continue to be deceivers of the
ignorant and suffering, and the plague of true med
ical science. Better to cope with the medical char
latan, and in the present instance with the legion
of uneducated practitioners, an important step
has just been taken by the confederation of state
medical boards meeting in Chicago. These boards,
of course, represent the advanced public sentiment
of their communities and what is more the scientific
standard of such great centers of medical teaching
ami practice as Chicago. This conference discussed a
way to reduce the number of medical colleges is
suing diplomas to students unworthy to be classed
as physicians. It is the first step of the campaign
to be taken up at the national convention of the
American Medical Association which meets in
Washington this month. At the Chicago confer
ence a distinguished Chicago physician said that on
ly six of the country’s 150 medical colleges are
really what they should be. Os course scores of
these institutions would indignantly repudiate such
classification, but none lhe less by this charge the
public may estimate what the experts of medi
cine think about a great number of their profes
sional contemporaries. Another sidelight on the
problem was thrown by the secretary of the confed
eration when he said that, whereas it cost the state
universities, with all their numbers and perfected
equipment, SSOO a year to graduate each medical
student, many inferior institutions do this at SIOO
a year. Tn view of such conditions as these the
confederation unanimously adopted the following:
“Resolved, that a committee of five be appointed,
of which the president and secretary shall be mem
bers, whose duty it shall be to secure all data pos
sible concerning the medical colleges of the coun
try and to report at the next meeting of the con
federation with recommendations looking to the bet
ter control of the colleges by the states in which
they are situated.” The reforms proposed cannot
too generally be approved by the public. Whatever
be the school of medicine its practitioners should
not guess, but know, and they should know much.
The physician’s subjects are either his beneficiaries
or his victims. The average physician cannot in
his youth know either all of book medicine or of
practical medicine; but no man should be commis
sioned to heal disease who does not know well all
that he pretends to know. To start with he should
be a college graduate, and have taken a course in
an institution approved by the custodians of the
science as it is recorded and practiced today.
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Weighing the Soul.
So much has been said in the public prints with
reference to an alleged experiment indicating that
the human soul has weight, and that at the moment
of the death of the body its weight could be deter
mined in some manner, that much interest has been
aroused; though few had any faith in the truth
of such a proposition. Dr. Chas. Duncan MacDou
gall, of Haverhill, Mass., who made the experiments
in question, a distinguished authority, has recently
written an article which furnishes more definite
information as to his methods of research and the
facts he claims to have been disclosed, than had been
heretofore given to the public.
Scientific interest evidently attaches rather to the
accuracy of Dr. MacDougall’s experiments than to
his theories of soul-substance. He laments greatly
the premature publicity given to his researches,
which he fears will now put an end to the possi
bility of carrying them further. Even in the six
cases where he was able to weigh a dying person
he had much trouble with hospital officials and oth
ers. Fifteen dogs, treated in the same manner,
showed no appreciable loss of weight at death. Dr.
MacDougall says in his article:
“If it is definitely proven that there is in the
human being a loss of substance at death not ac
counted for by known channels of loss, and that
such loss of substance does not occur in the dog,
as my experiments would seem to show, then we
have here a physiological difference between the
human and the canine at least and probably be
tween (he human and all other forms of animal life.
“I am aware that a large number of experiments
would require to be made before the matter can
be proven beyond any possibility of error, but if
further and sufficient experimentation proves that
there is a loss of substance occurring at death and
not accounted for by known channels of loss, the
establishment of such a truth cannot fail to be of
the utmost importance.”
Mr. Hereward Carrington, the author of an
article published in the Journal of the American
Society for Psychical Research, concludes his dis
cussion of the question as to the soul possessing
weight, in the following manner, which we believe
will appeal to most persons as the intelligent view:
“While . . . . I think that Dr. MacDougall
has certainly made some most interesting and im
portant discoveries, and that further experiment
along these lines is greatly to be desired, we cannot
hold out much hope that we shall, by such means,
ever demonstrate that the human soul weighs an
ounce —even though the reality of the losses be
proved. The conditions attendant upon death are
so little known, and the human organism is subject
to such queer variations in weight, even when alive,
that many and positive proofs will have to be forth
coming before his interpretation of the facts —
even though they themselves should be established
—can be accepted by science.”
It seems a step in the direction of universal
prohibition when medical men and scientists rec
ognize and announce the dangerous element in al
cohol. A notable instance of this recognition is
found in a lecture recently delivered by Dr. E. O.
Taylor, of Boston, in which he ranks alcoholic
drinks with such narcotics as morphine, cocaine
and all other forms of opium.
Dr. Taylor says, in part, that “the appetite for
liquor is as abnormal and inexcusable as the apa
tite of the morphine fiend and the user of liquor
ought to be as much ashamed of his habit as is
the user of morphine or opium.” This lecture is
of special value because of the authoritative char
acter of Dr. Taylor’s conclusions.
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