irritation and consequent inflammation if allowed to remain in the throat. On the other hand the foreign body, if at all large, may cause an obstruction of the air passages, and if not removed speedily, either by violent coughing on the part of the patient, or by the laryngeal forceps in the hands of a physician, death will ensue by suffocation.

In the foregoing lines we have endeavored to give an idea of the causes of loss of voice and their nature, and have enumerated some of the conditions found to accompany a failing of the vocal organs. We could do so, however, only very superficially, as the subject is a very extended one, and as space would not allow us to give a detailed description of the acoustic laws involved and the anatomical changes observed in cases of throat disease. All these may be found in text-books on the different subjects involved, where they are fully described.

CARL SEILER, M. D.

Ο

A FRENCH SAVANT.

NLY forty years have passed since the death of André Marie Ampère, yet the general reader, even though quite industrious, has perhaps never heard his name. Much less would he sup

of gratitude for most child he labored long

pose that mathematics owes him a debt profound pioneer work; that while a mere and with remarkable method to construct the primitive universal language which might lessen the labors of the learned and greatly accelerate the progress of the race. Physics too received from his ready brain and skillful hand some of her profound generalizations on the connection of electricity and magnetism. Botany ranks him among her most successful votaries. Yet he was a laborious teacher, struggling with difficulties; and his favorite study was quite distinct from all those just mentioned, his greatest powers and most enthusiastic efforts being always given to psychology. Jean Jacques Ampère was a well educated merchant of Lyons, To him and Jeanne Antoinette, his wife, was born a son, André Marie by name, January 22d, 1775. Soon after the family removed to a small farm in the hamlet of Poleymieux-lez-Mont-d'Or, still near Lyons.

Little André showed a remarkable genius for mathematics, performing long calculations with a few pebbles, and that before he knew how to form figures or anything of their use. During a serious illness his anxious mother took away his counters, but as soon as he was allowed some pieces of biscut they were substituted, thus ministering to the needs of the mind rather than the body. Learning to read, instead of being a process painful alike to teacher and pupil, never finished and almost or quite barren of results, was the easy grasping of a talisman more potent than lamp or ring of Eastern fable. He devoured books of every kind, and a marvelous memory, vivid imagination, and strong, early-developed reason, enabled him to retain and assimilate to a wonderful degree. Perhaps the most important of his studies in its effect on the whole tone and power of his mind was the reading of the Encyclopedia in alphabetical order. Twenty volumes of the carefully-condensed wisdom of the world, read and pondered by a child of thirteen, surely show an eagerness for knowledge and a persistence in labor which might well put riper years to shame.

To form a universal language was one of his early attempts; and he was to substitute for existing tongues, not an arbitrary creation, but the primitive dialect rediscovered and reinstated by a profound use of reason. A grammar and dictionary almost complete, and a poem, all still existing in manuscript, testify to his early powers of execution. It was a source of great pleasure in later years to find several of his combinations in Sanscrit and in one of the languages of Africa.

At eighteen the French Revolution deprived Ampère of his tender father, and the same stroke seemed to have quenched the light of his intellect. For more than a year he spent his days in utter listlessness, sometimes heaping up little piles of sand as the greatest stretch of his powers. J. J. Rousseau's botanical letters threw the first rays of light into his darkened mind, and he pursued the science with avidity, reading at the same time the Latin poets, to such purpose that forty years after he composed one hundred and fiftyeight lines without consulting any authority for the quantity. The following incident illustrates the thoroughness of his botanical studies, and the ease with which he recurred to them after long service in widely different departments. De Jussieu had left the genus Begonia unassigned to any of the natural orders, from the difficulty he found in determining its proper place. Auguste de Saint Hilaire

had examined with great care a large number of species growing in Brazil, and had satisfied himself of their affinities. Ampère, meeting M. de Saint Hilaire, said: "I found yesterday while walking the garden, a Begonia, and amused myself examining it. With what family do you classify it ?" "Since you have examined it, permit me to ask you how you would classify it ?" I would place it in the adjoining group of the Onagraceæ,” replied Ampère. This was just the conclusion reached by the botanist after exhaustive study in the native locality of the plants.

Curiously enough, the extraordinary activity of mind shown by our student was associated throughout his early years with great imperfection in the two chief avenues of knowledge, sight and hearing. He was very near-sighted, and it was when eighteen years old that by accident he tried a pair of glasses just suited to his eyes. It was a revelation. All nature appeared in a new and wonderful form. He wept for joy, and ever after took great delight in the exercise of this late-found sense. His vivid imagination and well-stored memory gave him, in a remarkable degree, what might almost be called a "second sight," the power of seeing in the most unattractive place the possible beauties and improvements, almost as if they were before his eyes. It was not till thirty that music had charms for our friend. He visited a concert where the programme was made up of Glück's music. Ampère not only failed to be delighted, he was distressed. He twisted in his seat, walked about, placed himself in a corner of the room with his back to the audience. At last, when it seemed no longer endurable, some simple melodies succeeded. A flood of tears showed the delight and relief experienced, and ever after his ear was attuned to sweet sounds. But we have passed in silence over a development more important than either of these already mentioned. One page among his papers begins as follows: "One day while strolling, after sunset, along the banks of a solitary stream,"Why was the sentence unfinished? We can only conjecture that he found words powerless to express his feelings, or even to chronicle their occasion. Had his pen not failed him he would have told of seeing two young girls gathering flowers, and that one of these, Miss Julie Carron, inspired him on the spot with so ardent an affection that he wished to marry that very day, and would have consented to forego science and embrace a shopman's life. Wiser counsels prevailed in both particulars; and after three years spent in giving private lessons in mathematics at

Lyons, he greeted his Julie as his new-made bride. A son was ́ born to him in the following year, and he was compelled to seek a more certain and ample support. He was fortunate in obtaining the chair of physics in the central school at Bourg, and leaving his wife seriously ill, went thither in 1801. He had formed very intimate attachments with a number of talented young men at Lyons; from Bourg and from Paris, his heart ever turned to his beloved birth-place.

M. Ampère's stay at Bourg was distinguished by the publication of "Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Play," in which he demonstrated the certain ruin of the professional gambler who plays fairly. This work showed such mathematical powers that the author was called to Paris and made tutor in the Polytechnic School. His studious life had left him very slightly cultivated as to matters of dress. The school was military in its character, yet the new tutor shocked his pupils by coming before them in a fashionable coat, and that badly cut and made. For weeks the unlucky garment neutralized much of the profound mathematical truth set forth in the lectures. The mischievous young men, by complaints of the difficulty they had in seeing the characters on the blackboard, led him to increase their size to a most ridiculous extent. Spite of all these interruptions and drawbacks, his lectures sustained and even increased his reputation.

A favorite pursuit of Ampère's at this period was metaphysics. He designed to publish a book, to be styled: "Introduction to Philosophy." Even at Paris he found few to join him in the profound discussions by which he wished to search out absolute truth. He wished to visit Lyons, hoping to find more enthusiasm among the young men with whom he had been used to meet before sunrise in the fifth story of a tenement to read Lavoisier's Chemistry, Even these friends sought to confine Ampère to more familiar fields. He writes: "How can I abandon a country full of flowers and fresh running waters, how give up streams and groves, for the deserts scorched by the rays of a mathematical sun, which, diffusing over all surrounding objects the most brilliant light, withers and dries them to the very roots?" Strong and well-disciplined powers have searched the savant's manuscripts for these psychological beauties, but their unaccustomed vision found only darkness "which may be felt." With all his fondness for discussion, Ampère was not in the least like that devoted grammarian who called down

heaven's direst vengeance on the holders of opinions contrary to his own. Some notes of Prof. Bredin contain the following: "Very animated discussions daily arose between us, and in them originated that holy and indissoluble friendship which has so firmly united us."

As tutor and afterwards professor of mathematics, Ampère directed his genius to the increase of mathematical knowledge, as well as to its diffusion. Whether it was the lucid demonstration of a geometrical truth whose very simplicity had defied proof, or the most abstruse researches in analysis, he never failed to astonish all with the completeness and importance of his work. In 1813 he succeeded Lagrange as member of the French Academy. The relation between magnetism and electricity had long been a vexed question which baffled the ingenuity of the scientific world. In 1819 Ersted, a Danish physicist, announced the remarkable discovery that a galvanic current passing along a wire parallel to the magnetic needle would turn the north pole of the needle to the west if above the needle, to the east if below. At the regular weekly meeting of the Academy, held Monday, Sept. 11, 1820, a member from Geneva repeated Ersted's experiment. A week later Ampère presented the more general and startling fact that two parallel connecting wires attract each other when the electric current passes through them in the same direction, and repel each other when it passes in opposite directions. He also devised the astatic compass, in which the magnetic action of the earth ceases to oppose the effect of the electrical current, and the feeblest current produces the same result as the most powerful, that is, brings the needle to a position exactly at right angles with the electrical force. These discoveries laid a sure foundation for the imposing structure of electro-dynamics, and led directly to the secret of the earth's magnetic polarity.

Brilliant and practical as were these experiments and the conclusions they reached, there were not wanting those who denied any credit to their author. It was claimed that the attractions and repulsions of the electrical current were hardly different at all from those which had been familiar ever since electricity had been an object of research. This objection was soon disposed of. Bodies similarly electrified repel each other; similar currents attract each other. Bodies in an opposite condition of electricity attract each other; unlike currents repel each other. Two bodies similarly