COURT.
Her Most Gracious Majesty, accompanied by the Princess Urania, and attended by Dr. Brown and Dr. Robinson, Lords Physicians in Waiting, honoured Dr. Scalpel’s studio by a visit, during which Dr. Scalpel exhibited to the youthful Princess several beautiful preparations of various cutaneous diseases, and of the morbid anatomy of Lupus and Elephantiasis.
Sir R. Atmosphere, Astronomer Royal, Sir A. Diggory, Geologist in Ordinary to her Majesty, and the eminent Chemist, Herr Von Pestle-Mortar, had the honour of dining with the Queen at Windsor Castle at 10 P.M. The Lord Doctor of Winchester, Her Majesty’s Medical Confessor, said the new Grace (“May good digestion wait on appetite”) at the commencement of the repast, and the Band, with chorus of male and female voices, performed at the conclusion the Hymn, “Oh, take thy pill,—Oh, take thy pill,—Oh, take thy pilgrim home.”
In examining the journals of a foreign country, the intelligent reader will generally be able to gather some insight into the habits of the natives by passing his eye down the columns of advertisements and noting the class of objects presented for sale. In the Age of Science there are no less than fifty the vast pages we have described devoted to announcements and puffs of the most astonishing variety, including hundreds of articles whose names and uses are at present quite unknown. Of advertisements of servants and other persons requiring employment we have not found a single instance, but there were at least twenty columns of invitations to “Ladies and Gentlemen” to be so kind as to act for the advertiser in the capacity of housekeeper, steward, superintendent of the house, or some equally well-sounding office, the remuneration offered being at the lowest, it would seem, about £200 a year, with “the use of a steam carriage,” and “every other luxury desired.”
We must, however, leave the columns of Advertisements for future examination, and proceed to give an account of the more important Law and Police Reports, which form, perhaps, the most surprising part of the Age of Science. It would appear that it had become necessary to hold assizes in at least twenty towns and villages in every county; and that the judges were incessantly occupied with cases of robbery, garrotting, arson, rape, stabbing, poisoning, and (strange to remark) a number of offences with new names, of whose nature we can merely guess, but which appear to involve mortal injury to the victim. The words employed, such as “Debarrassing,” “Morbifying,” “Disbraining,” “Petroleumization,” “Electroding,” “Mesmeraciding,” &c., seem to have become so common as to need no definition, and to have taken their place in the statute book. For all these crimes the same class of penalties are allotted; the convicted persons are invariably sentenced by the presiding judge to so many weeks’ or months’ detention—not in prison, but in the Penal Hospitals of their respective towns or villages. The principle on which crime is thus visited appears from the addresses of several of the magistrates, who remark that the “diseased minds” exhibited by the robbers and murderers “obviously require careful medical treatment,” and that they trust that the eminent Physicians and Surgeons to whom the prisoners are consigned will not fail to complete their cure. In numerous cases, as the offenders have been sentenced many times previously, the judge speaks of their crime as exhibiting “an intermittent fever” of homicidal rage, or of covetousness. Remarks are also always made by the reporters as to the “abnormal cerebral development” or “morbid symptoms” exhibited by the criminals, and the tone assumed in speaking of them (even in cases of what we should term the most cruel and brutal murders) is invariably one of scientific study and calm philosophic analysis.
A very different method of treatment, however, is adopted towards another class of offenders, whom it would appear the authorities in the Age of Science are determined to put down in grim earnest. That our readers may not suppose we mistake the sense of the amazing paragraphs in which these new features of English legislation appear, we quote them as they stand in the Age of Science, pp. 63 and 64.
POLICE.
At the Mansion House this morning, 79 men and 140 women were summoned for the non-attendance of their boys under two years old at the Public Infants’ Science Classes in the new Kinder Garten in the Tower. Various pleas were, as usual, put forth by the defendants, purporting to prove in some cases that the children were ill with small-pox and scarlet fever, and in several instances that they were dying or dead. Mr. Alderman Busby remarked that “if they were to listen to such pleas, children would grow up to three or four years old without learning even the rudiments of astronomy or palæontology.” He ordered all the fathers to be publicly flogged, and the mothers to receive each a dozen stripes of the birch privately, in the State Whipping House, and to stand on benches for three days in the nearest Elementary School during school hours.
[Similar judgments are recorded at Westminster, Worship Street, Clerkenwell, and several other police-courts in London and the provincial towns.]
MIDDLESEX SESSIONS.