SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, 18 September 1919, Page 46

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

(By “Volt.”)

Centenary of the Collar.

It is just 100 years since the first detachable collar was made by the wife of a New York blacksmith for her husband, in order to save herself the trouble of too frequently washing his shirts, with their collars made all in one piece, as was then the custom. The idea appealed to the minister of the church they both attended, the Rev. Ebenezer Brown, who, on.his retirement from the ministry 10 years later, opened a small factory and started to manufacture detachable collars as a business proposition. They quickly caught on, and from this insignificant beginning the industry has grown to its present immense proportions.

Benefits of Walking.

“Walk, walk, walk every day, and while walking give the arms full play. By so doing the bones, blood, muscles, nerves, and brain will be kept in healthy activity. Moreover, never mind the weather. Take your exercises, be the day wet or fine, hot or cold. Above, all, avoid sitting over a fire. Nothing is more conducive to senility.” This is the prescription of Sir Hermann Weber, the eminent European physician, who has just died at the age of 95 years. Certainly there could be no better recommendation of the virtue of walking than the life of Sir Hermann. Walking is something that cannot be overdone, and at the same time it is something that seems to be very much out of fashion at the present time. In this day of automobiles the man who walks is the exception, and while the man in the motor car derives a vast amount of benefit from his- trips into the country and through getting his lungs pumped full of fresh air, he does not obtain the great variety of health-giving features that come with walking. Why Do We Sleep?

Some of the most usual things are also .the most wonderful (writes “M.D.” in the Daily Express ), but just because they are so familiar it never occurs to us how wonderful they really are. In all the complex arrangements that go to make up human life there is, perhaps, none more remarkable than that by which at regular intervals our consciousness is blotted out, the activities of our bodies and minds cease, and sleep alone possesses us. Yet since this miracle happens in the ordinary course to every healthy individual every day of his life, the wonder of it never strikes us. We do not stop to ponder on it and, to ask what is it that happens when life is thus almost completely interrupted. Why do we sleep, and more, why do we wake again? The physiologist tells us that sleep is a “synaptic dissociation of neurons.” It may be, but we are not much the wiser for that, even if we know both what is a neuron and what happens to it when it is synaptically dissociated. No, wo do not know just what sleep is nor why it happens. It used to be thought that sleep happened because the circulation of blood through the brain grew so feeble that this, the seat of consciousness, could work no longer and sleep took place. Many years ago, indeed, a surgeon studying the subject watched the failing circulation of the brain through a hole in the skull of a sleeping animal. Yet this is only effect, not cause. The brain has less blood because it sleeps; it does not sleep because it has less blood. More recently it has been thought that during our active day we make, by the activities of our muscles, a poison which has the peculiar action of deadening mental action. This gradually accumulates in us till, by the time that sleep is due at night, the brain is overpowered. This argument is supported by the familiar fact that there are many poisons, drugs of the “dope” class, for example, which are certainly capable of producing sleep. Sleep is a necessity of life no less than is food. No man has ever succeeded in keeping awake for more than a few days continuously. If he is forced to do so, as in ancient Chinese tortures, where constant tickling of the feet made sleep impossible, he falls at last into a comatose state from which he never awakes.