got to Parkersburg before the train left that station and notified the crew, who remedied the matter before any serious damage was done. A few days later he saw that the brake rigging under a northbound extra was down. Immediately he hurried by hand car a mile and a half to the nearest station and notified the despatcher, who, in turn, "caught" the extra with a warning message at the next signal station north and the brakes were repaired. Cook need not have done any of these thoughtful deeds; they were "none of his business". Yet, it is not improbable, that in this one month alone he saved the railroad thousands of dollars and prevented a loss of life. There are fifty thousand employes on the Northwestern, and the same spirit is permeating the entire body, each man being made to feel that he has a part in this great safety movement. When the forty-six roads that have adopted Richards' plan have time to get it on a working basis as effective as the Northwestern's, the accident totals for the country must necessarily show reductions despite constantly increasing traffic. These forty-six roads operate more than sixty per cent of the railroad mileage in the

United States. The first twenty months of the safety movement on the Northwestern, compared with the preceding twenty months (when the amount of business was no greater), show the following surprising reductions: 32 fewer trainmen killed, a decrease of 51.6 per cent; 2,183 fewer trainmen injured, a decrease of 42.5 per cent; 11 fewer switchmen killed, a decrease of 40.8 per cent; 222 fewer switchmen injured, a decrease of 20.7 per cent; 1,025 trackmen injured, a decrease of 36.6 per cent; and SO on through a long list to this splendid total: 152 fewer persons killed, a decrease of 25.9 per cent; 4,845 fewer persons injured, a decrease of 29.1 per cent.

Richards is proud of these figures. The long line of railroad widows, railroad orphans, and railroad cripples is still filing into his office day after day and his heart aches for them. But he believes that he has found a way which will ultimately lessen the horrors of railroading, not twenty-five or thirty per cent, but fifty or sixty per cent. Is it any wonder that he is called to "preach" to railroad employes in all parts of the country the gospel of "the conservation of men"?

O

Na keen, frosty morning,
when the bones are brittle,
an old man falls on an icy
pavement and snap
goes his femur.

If he were only twenty, the
fractured thigh-bone,
properly set, would knit
in a few weeks, but being
seventy it will take a
much longer time, in fact,
the severed parts may
never unite.

"Ah," sighs the surgeon, "if I but had some agent by which I could accelerate Nature's slow reparative process and enable this old man to walk again!

As it is,

he probably will be a cripple for the remaining years of his life.' Well, this wonderful agent has been found. Though not as yet in general use, there is every reason to believe that it soon will be; and not only does it encourage bone growth and rapid and certain knitting of fractures, but but it quickly heals flesh wounds of various kinds. This has been amply proved by Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel prize winner for medical research for 1912, in his experiments at the Rockefeller In

stitute in New York.

The agent used by Dr. Carrel in his experimental work was an extract made from the pulp of animal tissues and organs. Dr. Carrel found, for example, that the application of thyroid gland pulp to cutaneous wounds in a dog speedily resulted in the formation of those pellicles, or granulations, which complete the process of healing and which subsequently contract and become white, forming the scar. Applied to bone, it produced a marked thickening of the periosteum. The external coat of an artery preserved in a mixture of thyroid gland and Locke's solution and transplanted afterward in a dog's carotid underwent an enormous hypertrophy, or increase of

substance.

Surgeons are confidently counting upon the agent thus employed to "activate" the processes of repair ten times, so that a cutaneous wound in a normal adult will heal in less than twenty-four hours and a fracture of a leg will knit in four or five days.

Surgical science, now in its sevenleague boots, has made astounding strides in the past few years, but none more wonderful than this. Yet it is strange that when, years and years ago, it was found that all animal growth and consequently all healing of wounds and fractures was simply the result of the multiplication of cells, scientists did not set to work to discover the factors that brought about this multiplication. It was known that it was elementally caused by the division of the cell nucleus into separate parts, after which the individual growth of these parts began and continued; but until late years no one seems to have studied out a means by which this division might be made.

The system now used for this division and multiplication was not discovered by Dr. Carrel, though he has made the first extension and conclusive applications of it. For the first successful experiments in this line the world is indebted to the two Loebs, Jacques and Leo, both deep students of biology.

About fifteen years ago Dr. Jacques Loeb, then professor of physiology in the University of California, began, after the fashion of the "terrible Germans", to study the possibilities of the chemical fertilization of animal eggs. From his labo

were

ratory in Berkeley, he went down the Pacific shore at Monterey and collected a lot of sea urchins. He experimented with various chemical solutions until he succeeded in artificially impregnating the eggs of these low marine organisms and of hatching out the sea urchins. When this and other facts concerning his successful biological researches made known to the scientific world, California, though a large State, became too small for Jacques Loeb. Today he is head of the department of experimental biology of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, in New York. His egg-fertilizing experiments have progressed to such a point that the other day he showed a scientific friend of mine a large bullfrog grown from a fatherless tadpole. In other words, the egg laid by the female frog had been chemically fertilized and then had hatched in the usual way. The production of this fatherless frog is the highest point yet reached in this line of biological adven

ture.

Now while the artificial propagation of sea urchins or bullfrogs is inconsequential when considered by itself and is merely an original and scientific fact, what it may lead to is of the utmost importance to human life upon a planet where, as Ray declared long ago, there is no such thing as spontaneous generation and where human beings are still born in travail. For, with this established fact as a basis, the artificial production of any form of life may yet become possible. What these studies have led to already is of great significance and will be of tremendous benefit to the race.

Jacques Loeb discovered, during his experiments with California sea urchins, that cell division could be induced by chemical agents. At the same time Leo Loeb, of St. Louis, was exploring this little-known field of scientific research. Leo Loeb succeeded in cultivating tissues outside the body in coagulated blood serum. Dr. Loeb was a man of such limited means that he could not afford to buy a thermostat. He therefore conceived the idea of using a live animal instead of this instrument, so that the temperature should be properly regulated. He sewed up his excised tissues beneath the skins of dogs and they flourished.

He sewed up alien tissue beneath the skin of dogs and it grew. Handicapped by lack of funds he was compelled to substitute a live animal for a thermostat.

The results were the same as those lately obtained by Dr. Carrel, who grew the tissues in vitro, that is, in a glass jar. Dr. Loeb did not have the means of publishing his report, and on being privately circulated in 1897 it was pronounced by many worthy biologists to be incredible.

Ten years later Dr. Ross G. Harrison of Yale imbedded tissues beneath the skin of frogs and later in a coagulated lymph and thus succeeded in preserving for a long time embryonic tissues in external media, though he did not observe the division and multiplication of new cells therein.

It will be seen, therefore, that the work of Dr. Carrel, though more important than that of his predecessors, was not altogether original. He simply improved and extended the means employed by the former workers in this field. But it must not be inferred that Dr. Carrel is

not worthy of the honors that have been heaped upon him. To be sure the newspapers have given him credit for more wonderful performances than he has ever dreamed of, but it seems meet that he should have been the recipient of the Nobel prize, for the reason that he has gone so many steps beyond his predecessors. That prize was awarded him because of his success in the development of his technique for transplanting living organs and tissues from one animal to another and from one part of the living body to another. He transplanted kidneys and connected blood vessels by an improved suturing. He was also successful in transplanting legs, ears, and other members upon foreign bodies. . Before he undertook this work of transplantation he made a series of long and patient microscopical studies. He would extirpate from a frog, a chick, a

dog, or a cat small pieces of tissue, fragments of skin of spleen, of kidney, or of heart, and, after placing these upon microscopic slides, he would pour upon each a drop or two of blood plasma, thus supplying the tissue with food for growth. This done, he would place the slides in an incubator at normal animal heat. Nearly all these tissues began, in technical language, to "proliferate", that is to grow, within a short time, some in a few hours, others in a few days. At first they showed at their edges a thin bluish area and this in time surrounded the piece of tissue. The living cells were sending into the plasma feelers along which other cells would form. These new cells were of all shapes, according to the kind of tissue that had given them birth. Their formation was easily witnessed by the experimenter who, through the microscope, could see the mysterious vital processes of animal life going on under his eye. These experiments were made during the years 1907 and 1908.

In other experiments made by Dr. Carrel in collaboration with Dr. Burrows in 1911, it was found possible to activate the growth of chicken tissues when extracts of chicken sarcoma-cancer tissue-and chick embryo were added to the culture medium. Cancer extract is one of the most powerful agents in the proliferation of animal matter. Cancer is not, as is generally understood by the lay reader, destructive of local tissue, but rather induces cellular growth. This as well as

a daring person may come along and offer himself as a subject for experiment. Pending this remote probability, a few advanced medical gentlemen in New York, eager to try out this and other new ideas upon human beings, are urging that criminals condemned to die be turned over to the experimental departments of medical institutions to be used as subjects in behalf of humanity. Dr. Rambaud of the Pasteur Institute is foremost in making this appeal to the state authorities. Dr. Rambaud does not believe in capital punishment and argues that beCause "a man burns down my house I have no right to burn down his house in retaliation.'

But while Dr. Carrel is probably more anxious than any other medical man to see his experiments with sarcoma applied to the quick healing of wounds and fractures, he is averse to risking the life of any person, even a criminal. I am told by medical men outside the Rockefeller Institute that the less dangerous extracts