494 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



miles from Halifax, and one which is directly in the track of 

 a large number of vessels passing between Europe and Amer- 

 ica, and upon which numerous disastrous shipwrecks have 

 occurred. The lights are to be very powerful, one of them 

 a revolving white light, and the other fixed. Fog-whistles 

 are also to be connected with each light-house so as to indi- 

 cate its vicinity in foggy weather. St. Johtfs Weekly Tele- 

 graph, October 20, 1872. 



LIFE-BOAT. 



Mr. N. J. Holmes, engineer of the Orkney and Shetland 

 Islands Telegraph Company, writes to the London Times in 

 regard to the subject of life-boats, and states that, three valu- 

 able lives having recently been lost by the swamping and 

 sinking of an open boat with stone ballast, he had recently 

 built a life-boat thirty feet long by eighteen feet broad, which 

 he had found to be unsinkable, and requiring no ballast, being 

 in every respect a life-boat. This is the form of the safety- 

 boat invented by Captain John Moody, built on the " ray" 

 principle, drawing only seven inches of water, carrying no 

 ballast, self-emptying, and "as stiff as a steeple" in a gale of 

 wind, with a fifty-foot mast and ample sails. He has been 

 employing her in very dangerous work, repairing the heavy 

 shore end of the Great Northern Telegraph Company's cable 

 in the North Sea, under circumstances when an ordinary boat 

 must have capsized. 3 A, January 27, 1872, 84. 



IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF POOR COAL. 



According to the Journal of Applied Sciences, the qualities 

 of the best anthracite or cannel coal may be given to poor 

 tertiary coals by soaking them in a mixture of naphtha and 

 bitumen. A similar treatment of peat, by means of the re- 

 siduum of kerosene refineries, has lately been adopted in the 

 United States, as furnishing a fuel far superior in heating 

 power, in freedom from foreign substances, and in availability 

 to the best qualities of true coal. 3 A, July 20, 1872, 27. 



