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Items of Interest Gathered Here and There
The Privilege of Kicking.
When Col. Bill Sterret first went to Washington
to report the news of the Capitol for his Texas pa
pers, he had desk room in the office of the late
Gen. H. V. Boynton, then the militant correspond
ent of the Cincinnati Commercial.
Gen. Boynton spoke out in meeting. He said
things about statesmen that made the statesmen an
gry. He had many personal encounters with pa
triots whose feelings had been ruffled.
One night a man came into Boynton’s office loud
ly proclaiming that he intended to shoot Boynton.
The general grabbed a chair, beat the intruder over
the head with it, knocked him down, and threw
him out. All this time Sterret sat at his desk look
ing on in great amazement.
When the man landed in the gutter, Sterret
came timidly over to Boynton. “General,” he
said, “being a new hand here, I don’t know the
practice of this office nor the customs that pertain
to Washington correspondents, and I didn’t want
to intrude. Now that I have seen what has hap
pened, I trust you will allow me a question?”
“Go ahead,” said Boynton.
“When the next man comes in, would it be too
forward if I should crave the privilege of kick
ing him a few times in honor of the sainted Con
federate dead?” —Saturday Evening Post.
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Credible Supernaturalism.
Such apparently supernatural occurrences as
“speaking with tongues,” trances, and healing of
diseases have been widely reported in connection
with religious revivals in India and parts of the
United States. Some account of those occurring
in our own country was given in our issue of
March 9. The reality of these manifestations, says
a writer in The Watchman (Boston), “has been
very fully attested by persons who would be read
ily believed regarding other matters. ’ ’ Besides
this, with only a few exceptions, he continues,
“those in whom these manifestations have ap
peared have given evidence of sincerity. They are
humble, earnest, and devout Christians, and have
shown no exceptional tendency to aberration, re
ligious or otherwise; and they have testified that
they have acted and spoken only as they were
moved by the Holy Spirit.” On the general ques
tion of the credibility of supernaturalism the writ
er continues:
“For the last forty years there has been a grow
ing tendency, not only among critics, but among
Bible expositors generally, to eliminate the super
natural from the Bible as far as possible. It has
been considered to be a gain when any event of
Bible history could be accounted for on natural
grounds rather than classed as a miracle. Insensi
bly this tendency has encroached on the life and
deeds of Jesus Christ, even among those who hold
themselves strictly evangelical. We have never
felt the necessity or even the desirability of this
tendency. If there is nothing supernatural in the
person and life of Jesus, then of course there is
no miracle in connection with him. But if the su
pernatural is admitted in anything, as, for exam
ple, in the resurrection of Jesus, there is no rea
son in trying to eliminate it from any other events
of Christ’s life. ‘From one know all.’
“Now, those who deny the miracles of Christ
and the apostles, and who say that the speaking
with tongues on the day of Pentecost and in the
church at Corinth was an illusion in the minds of
Paul and the early Christians, have these present
day occurrences to explain. As far as we have
been able to learn they cannot be denied. What
will those who deny the supernatural in Chris
tianity say of them? The healings and trances
may possibly be explained on natural grounds, but
how will they account for those who speak so as
to be understood in languages which they have
never learned, and which they cannot speak ex
cept when, as they assert, they are moved by the
Holy Spirit?”
Even if the speaking with tongues be accepted
Tbe Golden Age tor August 8,
as genuine, the writer goes on to say, “it should
be remembered that this is one of the least impor
tant of the gifts of the Spirit.” Further:
“In the church at Corinth there was a tendency
to exalt it unduly, and Paul writes that while he
spake with tongues more than all the members of
the church, he would rather speak five words with
his understanding than ten thousand words in a
tongue (1 Cor. 14:18). The same tendency to
exalt the speaking in tongues as mere wonder is
observable now. Whether in Corinth or in Los
Angeles, this is hurtful to higher spiritual expe
riences. Without question Paul was in the right
attitude when he charged the Corinthian Chris
tians not to forbid speaking with tongues, which
is for a sign to unbelievers, but to desire earnest
ly to prophesy which is for the edification of Chris
tians. It is unscriptural to make a less important
gift of the Spirit the most prominent feature in
Christian services. According to Paul, the speak
ing with tongues is not a gift to be sought, but the
gift of telling the Gospel to others, that they may
be saved, to be earnestly desired. ’—The Literary
Digest.
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What Is a Watt?
James Watt, the Scottish inventor and engineer,
was the man to whom we owe the idea of a horse
power, and when the electric unit involving the
idea of work came to be formulated the name of
Watt was chosen to indicate this unit, just as that
of Volta has given us the term volt and Farady the
farad.
Watt considered that taking the average, a Lon
don dray horse was capable of doing the work
of lifting 33,000 pounds through one foot of dis
tance in one minute of time, against gravity. The
introduction of this time limit, the minute, gave
the unit of power, or the rate of performing work.
This or its equivalent has ever since been called
a horse-power.
The electrical unit called the watt is capable of
being represented in terms of the horse-power, and
in that form it is perhaps more intelligible to those
who are familiar with mechanical, rather than with
electrical expressions. The electrical watt is the
product of volts multipied by amperes, where the
volt is the unit of electrical pressure and the am
pere is the' unit measuring the intensity of an elec
tric current.
Careful experiments have demonstrated that 74G
watts per second are equal to 550 foot-pounds per
second, or to state the equation in its usual form,
746 watts equal one horse-power. The form in
which electrical power is generally sold is computed
on the basis of kilowatt-hours. The prefix kilo
comes from the Greek Chilioi, one thousand. A
kilowatt, written also k.w., is therefore 1,000 watts.
The kilowatt-hour is the performance of work at
such a rate that 1,000 watts per second shall be de
livered continuously for one hour.
The kilowatt-hour, says the Scientific American,
has a special interest for the man who has his
office or house lighted by electric lamps, because
the kilowatt-hour is the unit upon which the power
and light companies base their charges.
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Curing Defectibe Children.
Pscychologists all over the world are watching
with scientific concern the result of experiments
being made in the University of Pennsylvania Sum
mer School.
Unique in the history of psychological research
are the clinical studies of retarded mental growth,
which Prof. Lightner Witmer and his associates
are carrying out.
To take a stupid child and make him normal, a
stammering, stuttering boy and cure his speech de
fects, to overcome a truant’s tendency toward va
grancy, and make a shrinking, timid youngster
look his fellow playmates in the sac are
some of the things being accomplished by the meth
ods in vogue at the university’s school of psycholo
gy-
Text books have been supplemented by actual-
ities. More than a dozen children whose mental
defects range from mild cases of arrested develop
ment to hopeless imbecility are brought to the lab
oratory every day for clinics.
These little ones are being kept in a private hos
pital by Dr. Witmer at his own expense, attended
by a special nurse, get hygienic care and proper
nourishment, as well as medical attention. The
students at the university are studying their im
provement and mastering the methods which lead
to it. *
These clinics are absorbing in their interest,
the first step when a child is admitted is to diag
nose his case. Medical inspectors test his hearing,
eyesight, sound his chest, and take his measure
ments. Hereditary conditions and his environment
are looked up. Every external influence that could
bear upon his case is considered, and the aim of
the professors is not only to use the child as a
pitiable example of deficiency, but to overcome his
defects, improve the conditions of his life, and
restore him to a normal state.
If it is found that incorrigibility arises from a
physical condition the child is sent to a hospital
for treatment, returning to the clinic each day so
the students may note his improvement.
If his retardation is simply mental he is put in
the training school at the university, where one or
more classes for backward children are in daily
session.
One of the most interesting of the daily clinics
is that carried on by Prof. Stevenson Smith, who
devotes all his attention to stuttering and stammer
ing children.
Prof. Smith, who has made a life study of speech
defects, says that the stammering child is as much
an object of pity and in need of scientific treatment
as the mentally deficient.
He gives innumerable reasons for stuttering,
tmong them, lack of co-ordination of movement in
the throat and Ups, the effect of accident which in
volves the motor aria, inherited physical defects,
and an abnormal condition of body or brain.
“There is nothing which so isolates a child from
his playmates and shuts him out of his right to a
happy, healthy development as inability to speak
clearly,” said Prof. Smith, when explaining his
treatment and the course he offers to those who
wish to make a study of speech defects.
“The stammerer is usually sullen and unmanage
able. He is jeered at by his companions, and an
object of aversion to his elders. He is uninterest
ing, and he knows it.
“His isolation affects his mind. He becomes
morbid, and his case calls for medical and scien
tific study.”—Philadelphia North American.
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A Literal Translation.
When General Kuroki visited Yale and heard
the college yell, according to Mr. John Kendrick
Bangs, in Harper’s Weekly, he turned to one of
the interpreters in the party and asked, “What are
they saying?”
“They have just remarked,” explained the in
terpreter, “that they are very glad, indeed, to
see you, and that they hope you will come again
and stay longer. They congratulate you upon your
victories in the East, and, in conclusion, they wish
to inform you that you have been unanimously
elected a Son of a Gambolier. ”
R R
One of the old time notions was that whiskey was
indispensable to the treatment of tuberculosis. Dr.
R. 11. Kime, of Atlanta, says this:
“Another fallacy that has done much harm is the
popular belief that alcoholics are a cure for con
sumption.
“The best medical authorities now claim such
an opinion is not true and that alcoholism frequent
ly not only produces tuberculosis, but other dis
eases, and renders the user less able to withstand
the invasion by disease and more certain to die when
attacked. Even the moderate drinker materially
lessens his chances for recovery from a majority
of the diseases which affect the human race.”
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