Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
This cleared up the matter at once for me, but I wished to complete the
elucidation with an experiment. I began by giving him ten, then twenty,
then thirty, then forty grammes of alcohol, up to eighty. I observed
that his personality began to change after forty grammes. He became
somewhat insolent and suspicious, and had vague delirious imaginings
of persecutions. When invited to sing anarchistic songs he refused,
evidently fearing to compromise himself, but sang them voluntarily in
an undertone. When the dose of alcohol was increased to ninety grammes
his personality seemed immediately to undergo a full change; his
touch became twice as fine (three millimetres), and his visual field
increased threefold; he declared that there was a spy around. When
put into his cell he sang anarchistic hymns, threatened death to the
king, handled a box as if brandishing a dagger, climbed to a window and
insulted the sentinel, resisted five men who tried to disarm him, and
continued in this condition for eight hours.
The next day he denied having done any of these things, avowed that
he was a good monarchist and a good citizen, and declared distinctly
that he had not done what he had done, in the face of the concurrent
testimony of several witnesses. On renewing the experiment a few
days afterward with eighty grammes of alcohol, the same series of
phenomena recurred--a real anarchistic raving, a genuine mania for
regicide, which would certainly have ended in some act if he had not
been restrained by force; and this person, who had at first presented
an evident obtusity of touch and an extraordinary contraction of the
visual field, now exhibited an almost normal touch of three millimetres
and a visual field enlarged to triple its extent when he was sober.
On the day after this he recollected none of all the things that
had happened the day before. This double personality was determined
in him by alcohol, as it is in others by misery or by fanaticism,
while it rests with all upon a congenital basis. The fact helps us
to explain how some inoffensive man may have a type of physiognomy
quite similar to that of Ravachol, showing how often there are true
criminals in potency, whose physiognomy, or rather the anomalies of it,
bears a prophetic relation to the crime which breaks out on the first
determining circumstance. And we have here another explanation of such
contradictory characters as those of Ravachol, Caserio, and Luccheni,
who, having been once well-behaved, end by becoming criminals.
* * * * *
Applied science was defined by Sir W. Roberts Austen, in his
presidential address to the Iron and Steel Institute, 1899, as
“nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes
of problems.”
WHAT MAKES THE TROLLEY CAR GO.
BY WILLIAM BAXTER, JR., C. E.
I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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