It would be rash to attempt to predict the future of the Röntgen ray. The uses to which it may be applied in surgery have already been hinted at in this article. The transparency of wood makes it possible to inspect the work of a carpenter, and determine whether the work hidden under the exterior finish has been honestly done. Hidden compartments in a desk or cabinet might be revealed. The contents of a packing-box might be ascertained without opening it. But to scientific men these rays have a very great interest. What are they? Are they vibrating movements transmitted in waves, like light? Are they particles shot off from the Crookes tube and flying with enormous velocity? These are questions to be answered.
When you stand in front of a Crookes tube in action these flying particles are streaming through your body, stopping not at all at your clothing, and hardly at all checked by the flesh, nor wholly stopped even by the bones. A hard-wood board held between you and the tube is no protection. The streams pass through it unchecked. Sheets of metal even do not wholly stop them. The wonder of it all is that for nearly twenty years experimenters with the Crookes tube have been pierced through and through by these subtle streams and have never known it. Do they produce any effect as they pass through the body? Can they cause or cure disease?
It has been proved that they pass quite freely through the lungs, but if tubercules are present they stop the rays. Might not the touch of the flowing streams dissipate the tuberculosis growth and restore health? Questions like these are coming up for solution, and experimenters are seeking the answers. The study of the Röntgen ray has just begun. What may not the next few months bring forth?
AN "OLD-FIELD" SCHOOL-GIRL.[1]
BY MARION HARLAND.
CHAPTER IV.
The Foggs lived on a funny little piece of land wedged in between two of the Greenfield farms. The house was a cabin of two rooms, with a stone chimney built on the outside, but the Foggs boasted that fifty-three children had been born and brought up in it. How they lived was a partial mystery to the neighborhood. They raised corn and potatoes and little else in the ground enclosed by a "worm-fence," built, it was more than suspected, of rails stolen, a few at a time, from the Greenfield fences. An acre of woodland behind the house was supposed to furnish them with fuel, and there were always pigs and chickens running wild, with a dozen or so children, in the road and fields.
They were "poor white folks" in a county where nearly everybody was respectable and well-to-do. No member of the family was ever convicted of an offence that took him into the courts. They might be suspected of stealing chickens, pigs, and wood, and even of robbing a smoke-house once in a while, but nothing was ever proved against them. Not one of them, so far as was known, had ever been in prison, and not one had ever grown rich or really respectable.
As the Grigsby children, neat and trim, lunch bags and books in hand, passed the Fogg cabin on the Monday morning the school opened, two men and four children were in and about the yard. Mrs. Fogg, the mistress of the house, stood on the porch, her married daughter, with two dirty babies holding to her skirt, leaned against a corner of the chimney; a barefoot boy was chopping sticks upon a log, a smaller boy trying to grind his knife upon a grind-stone. All stopped what they were doing to stare at the sisters and brother, and the elder matron hailed them in a coarse voice more like a man's than a woman's.