Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14 | Page 4

a magnificent testimonial to the genius of Faraday.
Death and honors.

RUDOLF VIRCHOW.
MEDICINE AND SURGERY.
BY FRANK P. FOSTER, M.D.
Jenner demonstrates efficacy of vaccination against small-pox.
Debt to the physicists, chemists, and botanists of the new era.
Appendicitis (peritonitis), its present frequency.
Experimental methods of study in physiology.
Hahnemann, founder of homoeopathy, and physical diagnosis of the sick.
The clinical thermometer and other instruments of precision.
Animal parasites the direct cause of many diseases.
Bacteria and the germ theory of disease.
Pasteur, viruses, and aseptic surgery.
Consumption and its germ; the corpuscles and their resistance to bacterial invasion.
Antitoxines as a cure in diphtheria.
Their use in surgery; asepticism and Lord Lister.
Listerism and midwifery.
American aid in the treatment of fractures.
Use of artificial serum in disease treatment.
Koch's tuberculin and its use in consumption.
Chemistry as a handmaid of medicine.
Brown-S��quard and "internal secretions".
Febrile ailment and cold-water applications.
Surgical anaesthetics; Long, Morton, and Simpson.
Ovariotomy operations by McDowell and Bell.
Professional nursing.
Virchow and the literature of medicine, anatomy, and physiology; his death; his "Archiv," "Cellular-Pathology," etc.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME XIV.
Dr. Jenner Vaccinates a Child After the painting by George Gaston Melingue Richard Wagner After the painting by Franz von Lenbach John Ruskin After a photograph from life Herbert Spencer After a photograph from life Charles Robert Darwin _After the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A._
John Ericsson From a contemporaneous engraving Li Hung Chang After a photograph from life David Livingstone After a photograph from life Sir Austen Henry Layard _After the painting by H. W. Phillips_
Michael Faraday After a photograph from life Rudolf Virchow After a photograph from life

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY.
RICHARD WAGNER: MODERN MUSIC.
BY HENRY T. FINCK.
If the Dresden schoolboys who attended the Kreuzschule in the years 1823-1827 could have been told that one of them was destined to be the greatest opera composer of all times, and to influence the musicians of all countries throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, they would, no doubt, have been very much surprised. Nor is it likely that they could have guessed which of them was the chosen one. For Richard Wagner--or Richard Geyer, as he was then called, after his stepfather--was by no means a youthful prodigy, like Mozart or Liszt. It is related that Beethoven shed tears of displeasure over his first music lessons; nevertheless, it was obvious from the beginning that he had a special gift for music. Richard Wagner, on the other hand, apparently had none. When he was eight years old his stepfather, shortly before his death, heard him play on the piano two pieces from one of Weber's operas, which made him wonder if Richard might "perhaps" have talent for music. His piano teacher did not believe even in that "perhaps," but told him bluntly he would "never amount to anything" as a musician.
For poetry, however, young Richard had a decided inclination in his school years; and this was significant, inasmuch as it afterwards became his cardinal maxim that in an opera "the play's the thing," and the music merely a means of intensifying the emotional expression. Before his time the music, or rather the singing of florid tunes, had been "the thing," and the libretto merely a peg to hang these tunes on. In this respect, therefore, the child was father to the man. At the age of eleven he received a prize for the best poem on the death of a schoolmate. At thirteen he translated the first twelve books of Homer's Odyssey. He studied English for the sole purpose of being able to read Shakspeare. Then he projected a stupendous tragedy, in the course of which he killed off forty-two persons, many of whom had to be brought back as ghosts to enable him to finish the play.
This extravagance also characterized his first efforts as a composer, when he at last turned to music, at the age of sixteen. One of his first tasks, when he had barely mastered the rudiments of composition, was to write an overture which he intended to be more complicated than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Heinrich Dorn, who recognized his talent amid all the bombast, conducted this piece at a concert. At the rehearsal the musicians were convulsed with laughter, and at the performance the audience was at first surprised and then disgusted at the persistence of the drum-player, who made himself heard loudly every fourth bar. Finally there was a general outburst of hilarity which taught the young man a needed lesson.
Undoubtedly the germs of his musical genius had been in Wagner's brain in his childhood,--for genius is not a thing that can be acquired. They had simply lain dormant, and it required a special influence to develop them. This influence was supplied by Weber and his operas. In 1815, two years after Wagner's birth, the King of Saxony founded a German opera in Dresden, where theretofore Italian opera had ruled alone. Weber was chosen as conductor, and