per cent, while the mortality in fifty cases not treated with serum was forty-two per cent. In Trieste the adoption of the antitoxine treatment has reduced the mortality from 58·3 to sixteen per cent, four hundred and six cases of diphtheria being thus treated.
Occasionally some bad effects have followed the administration of the serum, such as high fever, pain in the muscles and the joints, enlargement of the lymph glands, skin eruptions, and occasionally it seems to produce or hasten kidney complications.
The celebrated Prof. Virchow has said that while he was not such a worshiper of antitoxine serum as many of its first discoverers, and, like others, he was in doubt about many things pertaining to it that further experience might correct, still he could not refrain from saying that it was the duty of every earnest physician to use the remedy. The possibility that it would do harm was so insignificant that it might be ignored.
"SCIENCE"
We welcome with much satisfaction the reappearance, in an improved form, and apparently under the very best auspices, of our excellent contemporary, Science. The names upon its editorial committee are vouchers for the competence with which subjects falling into the several departments which these gentlemen supervise will be treated. The only important science which we fail to see on the list of those which our contemporary embraces in its programme is political and social science. It is true that the professors of this branch of science are not altogether at one even as regards the fundamentals of their subject; but all the more need is there for full discussion of that subject from every rational point of view. Psychology and paleontology, which are on the programme, are of interest chiefly as loading to wider and more intelligent views of man as a social and political animal; and we therefore trust, nay believe, that our revived contemporary, when it settles fully down to work, will have many a useful chapter to give us on the important topic to which we have called attention. Meantime we wish it, very heartily, all success.
Towards Utopia. Being Speculations in Social Evolution. By A Free Lance. New York: D. Appleton & Company. Pp. 252. Price, $1.
This is a book which we can cheerfully recommend to all who are interested in social questions. The author does not wear the badge of any school, and he writes in a style which is by no means academic. He believes in the duty of being as original as it is in one's power to be, and he therefore undertakes to apply some reforms, or what he considers such, to the accepted spelling of the English language and to some of its terms of expression. His theoretical convictions in regard to social principles are in general of the individualist order, but he is very far from being doctrinaire even on this ground. He is—to describe him briefly—a man of strong human sympathies and liberal tastes who has applied himself independently to consider the changes that will take place in society before it arrives at anything like its perfect development. The condition of perfect development he calls Utopia, and that he does not undertake to discuss or describe; he contents himself with the humbler task of describing in a discursive and very off-hand manner what he calls "semi-Utopia"—a condition of things intermediate between what we see now and the best and highest condition possible for humanity.
In the second chapter of the work occur the following excellent remarks: "Utopia can never be rightly seen otherwise than by the aid of science and a true philosophy that teach us to discriminate the possible and practicable from the impossible: the route can never be tracked by others than by pilots soundly trained in physical, psychological, and social science; and the march can never be performed by an army not disciplined and educated by the teach-
