"SNORING, AND HOW TO STOP IT."

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 16, 19 January 1878, Page 3

"SNORING, AND HOW TO STOP IT."

In tho current number of that excellent magazine, " The Popular Science Monthly.' is an article under the above title by Dr. John A. Wyeth. With only six linre of introductisn, Dr. Wyeth drops right down to hard pan, and in less than two pages gives us not only the. whole theory and practice of snoring, but gives us also an infallible prescription for its cure. When we reflect that the human race has beon snoring, in relays of successive generations, for a period popularly supposed to extend backwards over some, six thousand years, but. that probably is of much greater duration ; that this snoring has been absolutely continuous, being taken up by nation after nation, and people after people, from east to west, as the daily revolution of the earth has Carried night and slumber around the world ; that, in short, from a long time anterior to the creation of the pyramids, ages before the Neanderthal man went into his cave dwelling and snored himself into the lasting, snoreless sleep of death, milleniums uefore we of this present day turned our nostrils into accord with the universal sound—when wo reflect that during the whole of this enormous stretch of time the still air of the night has resounded with the snoro of millions of human beings, the absolutely revolutionary character of Dr. Wyoth's two-page article can be fitly appreciated. Using the comparative method of reasoning, we arrive at the conclusion that from tho dawn of the world, efforts haVo been uiadu to abate the snoring nuisance. In our own lives, each of us,. it is safe to attirm, has assayed to stop at least one snoror; and many of vis, finding our best efforts futile, have spent sleepless nights of misery—envying with a keen envy the ability possessed by the deaf adder to " stop its ear's to the sound of the Mioivr. snore be ever so viicly." And now, in the foIOMI of time, come- Di John V

Wyeth with a plan for banishing hesoeI forth and forever the sound of snoring i from off the face of the earth. It is a . simple plan, too, and ono involving but I trilling discomfort to those who for the benefit of their fellows put it into practice. Having given a brief demonstration of the phenomenon bused upon I " a human head split from above downward thiough the central line"; having ; shown us that " in order to snore one must keep the mouth open as well as the nose;" and that "it is only with the mouth open that snoring can be accomplished during sleep;" he informs us that "it follows that any device which prevents the lower jaw from dropping down, during the relaxation of sleep, una opening the mouth, 1 ' will render snoring u physical impossibility. He has, of course, devised an apparatus adapted to secure this result " A simple eap fitting the head snugly, and a piece of elastic webbing tacked to the chin-piece and to the head-cap near the ears." That is all, absolutely all, and yet, as we have pointed out, it reverses an order of things established since the very foundations of the world were laid. The simplicity of the device is its greatest charm, und we cannot but wonder that no one has hit upon it before. It is Columbus and the egg over again. Seemingly, any thoughtful man, understanding the cause of snoring and observing an inveterate snorer temporarily cured of his vicious habit by having his head tied up whilst suffering from toothache, could have jumped to this settlement of the matter; and an experimental apparatus might have been easily contrived by the judicious combination of the bulgy part of an old Congress gaiter set into the springs of an ordinary night-cap. But it is one thing to take an idea at second and another to develop it out of the raw. Now that Dr. Wyeth has given the world the benefit of his invention, it is not sufficiently unintelligible to mystify us; on the contrary, wo should honor his genius all the more for achieving so magnificent a result by the use of snch beautifully simple means. His is one of the great minds that reach out above the level of ordinary intellects and, with no seeming efiort, make straight tho crooked places and strengthen the halting efforts of the weak. And down in the snoreless ages of the future, when even the nature of snoring shall have become but a hazy, dubious tradition of the past, his name shall bo honored and revered until the very grandeur of his work shall relegate him into the sphere of mythology as being too good and great ever to havo lived on earth.