ing its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering sentient world. We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Men of Glasgow, these facts excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be—that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means different from those usually resorted to. The first requisite toward such propitiation is knowledge; the second is action, shaped and illuminated by that knowledge. Of knowledge we already see the dawn, which will open out by-and-by to perfect day, while the action which is to follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral and emotional nature of man—in his desire for personal well-being, in his sense of duty, in his compassionate sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. "How often," says Dr. William Budd, in his celebrated work on "Typhoid Fever"—"how often have I seen in past days, in the single narrow chamber of the day-laborer's cottage, the father in the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of some poor neighbor, who in too many cases paid the penalty of her kindness in becoming herself the victim of the same disorder!" From the vantage-ground already won I look forward with confident hope to the triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, whose intelligent cooperation is absolutely essential to success, the final victory of humanity is only a question of time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in the triumphs of surgery as practised at your doors.
| THE PROTECTION OF BUILDINGS FROM LIGHTNING. |
By Professor J. CLERK MAXWELL.
Most of those who have given directions for the construction of lightning-conductors have paid great attention to the upper and lower extremities of the conductor. They recommend that the upper extremity of the conductor should extend somewhat above the highest part of the building to be protected, and that it should terminate in a sharp point, and that the lower extremity should be carried as far as possible into the conducting strata of the ground, so as to "make" what telegraph engineers call "a good earth."
The electrical effect of such an arrangement is to tap, as it were, the gathering charge by facilitating a quiet discharge between the
