Volume 2 / Part 6 — Scientific Miscellanies

Mr. Walsh writes from Paris to the Journal of Commerce, in the last month, as follows:

The Annuaire, or Annual for the present year, has been issued by the Board of Longitude. M. Arago has appended to it nearly 200 pages on the Calendar in which he treats of all the divisions of time among the ancients and the moderns. This celebrated astronomer does not belie, in this notice, his reputation for handling scientific subjects so as to make them clear to common apprehension. He announces, in his second page, that he has completed and will soon publish a Treatise of Popular Astronomy; a desideratum for France. Sir John Herschel has supplied it for English readers, in his Outlines. The present history and explanations of the Calendar may be recommended, as material, to your Professor Loomis. In the section concerning the period at which the Paris clocks were first regulated on the mean or true time, Arago observes: "It will not happen again that an astronomer shall hear for a half hour, the same hour struck by different clocks, as Delambre told me he had often experienced. M. Chabrol, the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, before he would introduce this useful change, required, as a guaranty for himself, a report from the Board of Longitude: he was fearful that the change might provoke the working population to insurrection; that they might refuse to accept a mid-day or noon which, by a contradiction in terms, would not correspond to the middle of the day; which would divide in two unequal portions the time comprised between the rising and the setting of the sun. But this sinister anticipation was not realized; the operation passed without being perceived." It is all important, on the railroads, that the clocks at the different stations should be so regulated. Arago remarks that among the ancients it would have been dangerous to announce the existence of more than seven planets, owing to the "mysterious virtues" ascribed to that number; to complete it the sun was counted among the planets. He discusses the point—which is the first day of the week, and decides for Sunday. He devotes a section to the question—"Will the period come when the days will be equal between themselves, and have the same temperature throughout the year?" He concludes, of course, in the negative. He decides, also, that the nineteenth century began only on the 1st of January, 1801. Particular interest may be attributed to the section on the long series of ages which the ancients invested with the title "The Great Year." The high names of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, should not prevent us from regarding the opinions of antiquity on the relations of the great year, with the events of every kind observable on the earth, as among the crudest conceptions that have descended to the moderns.

At the sitting of the Academy of Sciences on the 24th ult., M. Augustin Cauchy read a memoir on the transversal vibrations of ether, and of the dispersion of colors. He furnished a simple, and easily intelligible mathematical theory of the various phenomena of light, and particularly, the theory of the dispersion of colors. Lord Brougham read a paper of his Researches, Experimental and Analytical, on Light. His Lordship's ambition is to shine in optics, as in every thing else; but you will see by a London paragraph that his researches have nearly cost him his eyesight. Dr. Aran submitted a Memoir, which seems to be quite important, on local anesthetic medication. "In the medical point of view," he remarks, "the number of cases in which local anesthetic applications may be employed, is truly immense. My experiments and researches, during many months, have conducted me to this practical result, which is worthy of all attention. Whenever an acute pain exists in any part of the animal economy, whether the pain constitute the malady in itself or be only an integral and principal part of it, the physician can relieve the patient of it for a longer or shorter time, by one or various local anesthetic applications. Great service, too, may be rendered by the precedent use of them in various surgical cases. The medication is wonderfully useful in articular acute rheumatism."

"Local anesthetic properties belong to all the agents in which the general have been found. They depend on the degree of fixity of the substance. A number of the anesthetics are irritating for the skin; chloroform in particular. According to Dr. Aran, the best agent for topical use is éther chlorhydique chloré. This is efficacious in a few minutes. Monsieur Recamier has submitted to the Academy of Medicine a galvanic cataplasm, by which, when it is applied to the skin, the benefit of electricity is fully conveyed, without the least pain. The reporter exclaims, 'Yes, who would have thought it? Electricity is transformed into cataplasm. This mysterious power, which, perhaps, is life itself, is reduced to an humble and common part in pharmaceutical science.'

"At the sitting of the Academy of Sciences on the 30th ult., a very interesting memoir (the 4th) was read by M.A. Masson, with the title, Studies of Electrical Photometry. He thinks that he has ascertained the cause of electrical light. He ascribes the Aurora Borealis to currents of great intensity situate in the higher regions of our atmosphere." The Report of Lieut. J.C. Walsh on his soundings, was referred for examination to Duperroy, the member most eminent in hydrography.

Monsieur Pouillet, the great Professor of Physics, has published in Paris a work entitled General Notions of Natural Philosophy and Meteorology, for the use of young persons; and Mr. Boussingault, eminent as a scientific agriculturist, the second edition of his Rural Economy considered in its Relations with Chemistry, Physics, and Mineralogy. The Treatise of Mineralogy by Dufresnoy, the celebrated Professor, who is of the Academy of Sciences, is complete, and at least equal to any other extant. There are four volumes octavo. The 22d volume of the memoirs of the Academy was ready in September last; the 23d is in the press; the 11th volume of Foreign Communications will appear this month. Twelve vacancies from death of foreign correspondents, are soon to be filled by election. All merit is ascribed to the work of Dr. Fairet, entitled Clinical Instructions respecting Mental Maladies. The author, pupil and successor of Pínel and Esquirol, is the physician of the Salpetriere. Along with the able Doctor Voison, he has a noble Lunatic Asylum of his own, not far from the capital.

Sir David Brewster, it seems, has become a convert to that part of Animal Magnetism called Electro Biology, and which consists in willing a person to be somebody else. After describing some wonderful experiments, made in the presence of several scientific gentlemen, by a Mr. Darling, he says, "they were all as convinced as I was, that the phenomena which we witnessed were real phenomena, and as well established as any other facts in physical science. The process by which the operator produces them—the mode by which that process acts upon the mind of the patient—and the reference of the phenomena to some general law in the constitution of man—may long remain unknown; but it is not difficult to see in the recent discoveries of M. Dubois Reymond and Matteucia, and in the laws which regulate the relative intensity of the external and internal impressions on the nerves of sensation, some not very indistinct indications of that remarkable process by which minds of peculiar sensibility are temporarily placed under the dominion of physical influences developed and directed by some living agent."