People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1893 — FORCING IDEAS TO FLOW. [ARTICLE]

FORCING IDEAS TO FLOW.

A London Physician’s Plan for Making Literary Composition Easy. Dr. Lauder Brunton, a London physician, has made a discovery which, according to the Daily News, ought to entitle him to the gratitude of all who live by intellectual labor. It is nothing less than the secret of how to have ideas at will. One night, after a long day’s work, this eminent physician was called upon to write an article immediately. He sat down with pen, ink and paper before him, but not a single idea came into his head, not a single word could he write. Lying back, he then soliloquized: “The brain is the same as it was yesterday, and it worked then; why will it not work to-day?” Then it occurred to him that the day before he was not so tired, and that probably the circulation was a little brisker than to-day. He next considered the various experiments on the connection between cerebral circulation and mental activity and concluded that if the blood would not come to the brain the best thing would be to bring the brain down to the blood. It was at this moment that he was seized with the happy thought of laying his head “flat upon the table." At once his ideas began to flow and his pen to run across the paper. By and by Dr. Brunton thought: “I am getting on so well I may sit up now.” But it would not do. “The moment,” he continues, “that I raised my head my mind became an utter blank, so I put my head down again flat upon the table and finished my article in that position.” ONE of the most important problems of the hour is the cheapest way to extract aluminum from the inexhaustible deposits of clay abounding in this country. The latest process is that invented by M. Faure, by which he expects to reduce the cost to about sixteen or eighteen cents a pound.—Inventive Age. IN the human blood there is an average of 300 red cells to every white one. The red cells have an average diameter of 1-3,200 of an inch, the white ones 1-25,000 inch.