is easy to see the color of gold on the sparkling backs of the salmon, whether they be silvered "Royal Chinook" or blood-red "Sock Eye." Perhaps it is too easy to stand at a distance and blame others for dipping their nets into the annual flood of money that gleams in the waters of the Columbia and its sister rivers. Nearly every ordinary human is doing the same thing in his own field, but it is a pity that such a race of royal fish should be utterly destroyed, as it promises now to be, and that an industry

which might yield a reasonable number of thousands every year, indefinitely, should be ruined by grasping and wasteful methods. The whole country is watching to see what Washington and Oregon will do in their legislative efforts to put an end to abuses and to control the salmon fishing. We can only wait to know whether the laws that have been passed will be effective for any good and whether future laws will reach the root of the troubles complained of. Meantime, the salmon are dying fast.

BUCH has been claimed for the achievements of medicine, surgery and sanitation in the lengthening of human life, but the fact remains that while the death rate has been lessened the years of the average man have not been appreciably prolonged. There is reason to hope, nevertheless, that the sciences that have checked the deadly epidemics, reduced infant mortality and defied death in many of its most terrible forms, will be able yet to combat that steady, insidious deterioration of the human body that, born with man at his birth, "steals from his figure, and no pace perceived."

To attack an enemy with any hope of victory it is necessary to know his nature and his powers; and a new warfare on dissolution was begun when science was able to say with certainty that in the blood of many a man whose step is yet springy and whose eye is yet clear there lurks and operates a malady that can mean only death if it is allowed to grow. To the mind of the unprofessional reader "arterio sclerosis" may appear to be a new and terrible disease. It is terrible, but it is only the name that

is new, as the years go. The disease itself is as old as man. What is new is the understanding of it, and, especially, the application to it of new treatments that hold out the fascinating prospect of longer life to mankind. And of all these treatments none is perhaps more revolutionary than the use of electricity to arrest that hardening of the arteries which may end in the failure of an overworked heart, or the breaking of a brittle bloodvessel in the brain. It is the new electrotherapy which Professor d'Arsonval of Paris has given to the medical profession, and which is now widely employed by physicians in Europe.

To approach intelligently the subject of this new treatment it is first needful to arrive at an understanding of what arterio sclerosis is. The difficulty of this is increased by the circumstance that doctors themselves have not yet been able to give it a definition satisfactory to themselves, much less to the laymen who may be, or think they may be, afflicted with the disease. However, in a recent article on this subject. Dr. H. Huchard gave the following definition of arterio sclerosis:

"A disseminated disease affecting different organs by means of indurated arteries, of large and, above all, of me

TESTING BLOOD PRESSURE IN PATIENT'S WRIST.

dium calibre, which is characterized by the formation of sclerosis, a sort of cicatricial tissue which takes the place of important elements of the tissues. All the organs may be attacked in turn,

which makes it rather a pathological family rather than a disease. But two organs mainly are injured: the heart and, above all, the kidneys. From this there arises an insufficiency of the central motor of the circulation, of that great laborer, the heart; whence again, the insufficiency of the urinary depuration by which the body is freed from poisons introduced into or formed within the organism. Arterial tension may be defined as the pressure exerted by the mass of blood upon the vessels. Arterial hypertension follows a sort of arterial contraction produced by poisonous secretions in the blood. The causes of the disease may be enumerated in the order of their frequency as follows: Gout and uricemia, saturnism or leadpoisoning, diet, syphilis, excessive use of tobacco, mental overwork and alcoholism. Persons become arterio-sclerous principally from the age of forty to the age of sixty, atheroma, the disease of old age, arriving later."

Professor d'Arsonval was visited in his home in the rue Claude Bernard. He

said that he has nothing to do with medicine now, having confined his attention to studies in electricity from the physiological standpoint, leaving the leaving the application of his discoveries to medicine to Dr. Moutier and others.

"I think Dr. Moutier will show you the apparatus by which the body may be electrified without being subjected to the shock of electricity," said " said Professor d'Arsonval. "You know of course that an electric current of low frequency is highly dangerous, being used even for the infliction of the death penalty in your country. But I have proved that currents of several thousand alternations a second may pass through the body without causing death or injury but, on the contrary, with positive benefit. The nerves are entirely insensible to oscillations of 20,000 and upwards a second. It is to be presumed that such a current has an effect similar to the colors that we cannot see, the sounds we do not hear; . for the eye and ear respectively are sensible to vibrations only of a certain rapidity. An alternating current of 20,000 oscillations is not even felt, but this does not mean that the human organism feels no effect. Such a current profoundly affects the inner tissues and

electricity of the proper frequency, and the treatment has the additional merit of being absolutely without pain. The patient, under my method, sits in a cage and has no contact with the apparatus. He does not actually receive the charge of electricity, but is in an electrically charged atmosphere. There is no danger, no suffering, no annoyance of any kind. And now for the rest I send you to Dr. Moutier."

There was no doubting the enthusiasm of Dr. Moutier, who took a permissible professional pleasure

in proclaiming the virtues of the new electrotherapy. "Come," he said, leading the way into an inner room of his office at 11 rue de Miromesnil. "You shall see for yourselves."

At one side of the room, against the wall, stood a cage, six feet in height and four feet in diameter, constructed simply of a series of coils of copper wire placed about four inches apart. Next to it, outside, is the Arsonval-Gaiff apparatus for furnishing electricity. An ordinary current of electricity is brought to the apparatus, which has the outward appearance of a common cupboard, and in which the electricity is transformed into high-pressure current, and thence communicated to the cage.

Another apparatus is a smaller, semicircular cage which, in treating certain cases, is let down from the ceiling over the patient's head. And there is also in the room a couch, at some distance from the coils of wire, used when the less acute forms of disease are treated.

"Will you enter the cage?" suggested Dr. Moutier.

It seemed somewhat like taking the

electric chair at Auburn, but Dr. Moutier's smile was reassuring.

"You will not even feel it. There is not the slightest danger," he said. And that was true. There is no direct connection between the chair in which the patient seats himself and the coils of wire. There was no sensation whatever when Dr. Moutier had turned on the current. But two silver coins held, one in each hand, emitted sparks, and showers of sparks fell when the doctor touched the patient's nose, ear, hair.

"If I placed this metal stick in your hands and attached electric light bulbs to it they would glow with light. You are permeated with electricity. You feel nothing, but the action of the electricity is none the less positive. Certain maladies that have hitherto been difficult of treatment respond readily to this application of electricity. Lithiasis, nephritic colic, hepatic colic, various liver complaints have been successfully combated. But its greatest result, and that which will make this method a great blessing to suffering mankind, is its effect upon arterio sclerosis itself.

"This is an insidious disease that creeps upon us imperceptibly. No attention is paid to it usually until it has reached a violent stage, when treatment is difficult and a cure sometimes impossible. We live by our arteries, through which the life-giving fluid is propelled through our entire organism. Under divers conditions the arteries lose their elasticity. They harden and become incapable of fulfilling their role. The blood circulates badly; extra work is thrown on the heart, and it suddenly

do that. But it is another matter to lower the arterial pressure. Alimentary regimen and medicine will possibly do it in a very slight degree, but not when the hypertension is great. To the task of regulating the blood pressure, and thus permitting the walls of the arteries to recover their elasticity and strength, the invention of Professor d'Arsonval adapts itself marvelously. His method he himself called autoconduction, but Professor Benedict, in Vienna, and I myself in France renamed it Arsonvalisation, in honor of its discoverer, and as such it is now known to specialists throughout Europe and used

but of course when the effects of arterio sclerosis have gone too far, and caused serious lesions it is evidently impossible to replace the injured organ with a new

one.

"What is much needed in connection with the treatment of arterio sclerosis is a practical instrument with which a patient's arterial pressure may be quickly and accurately measured. The sphygmometer, recently invented, serves us fairly well in the absence of a perfect instrument. I have had patients whose arterial pressure was as high as 24 when

by them in the treatment of arterio sclerosis and its attendant diseases. In every case that has come to me I have succeeded in lowering the arterial pressure,

15 is normal, and I have been able in a few months of electrization to reduce this pressure gradually to normal. The study of arterio sclerosis is too new, our statistics are too few, and our experience too little to warrant any positive claim of having found an unfailing cure for the disease. But to lower the arterial pressure from 24 to 15 is to make great progress in the cure, and that is what I unhesitat ingly claim for Professor d'Arsonval's invention. I can show on my books the case of one man whose arterial pressure I reduced to normal and who has in eight years suffered no return of hypertension. I

have even caused certain lesions to disappear and thus what appears to be permanent amelioration or cure has followed the use of d'Arsonval's invention."