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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



he receives convey appalling intelligence. 

 " Fancy," says he, " a tract of country 

 larger than thirteen Switzerlands a prey to 

 want that it is wellnigh impossible to re- 

 lieve. The people's faces are black with 

 hunger ; they are dying by thousands upon 

 thousands. Women and girls and boys are 

 openly offered for sale ; when I left the 

 country, a respectable married woman could 

 be easily bought for six dollars, and a little 

 girl for two. In cases where it was found 

 impossible to dispose of their children, par- 

 ents have been known to kill them, sooner 

 than witness their prolonged sufferings, in 

 many instances throwing themselves after- 

 ward down wells, or committing suicide by 

 arsenic. . . . The population subsisted for 

 a long time on roots and grass ; then they 

 found some nourishment in willow-buds, 

 and finally ate the thatches off their cottages. 

 The bark of trees served them for several 

 months, and last July I received specimens 

 of the stuff the unhappy creatures had been 

 by that time reduced to. The most harm- 

 less kind was potato-stalks, tough, stringy 

 fibres, which only the strongest teeth could 

 reduce to pulp. The other description was 

 red slate-stone.' 1 '' 



Proportion of Theine in Different Rinds 



of Tea. It was some time ago asserted by 

 Claus, as the result of his analyses of differ- 

 ent grades of tea, that the lower the grade 

 of tea the higher is the proportion of the 

 alkaloid theine it contained. Thus, accord- 

 ing to this author, the brick-tea used in 

 Mongolia and Siberia, which is made up of 

 all sorts of refuse, as dead leaves, stalks, 

 and the like, contains far more theine (about 

 3.5 per cent.) than the higher qualities (in 

 which the proportion found by him was from 

 1 to 1.3 per cent. only). Very different re- 

 sults have now been obtained by another 

 chemist Markovnikoff, of Moscow. Having 

 made a series of analyses of one kind of 

 tea by the various analytical methods hith- 

 erto in use, he is able to point out the de- 

 ficiency of these methods. For instance, 

 ether extracts only one-third of the whole 

 amount of theine in a sample of tea, and 

 benzole only one-quarter. Using, therefore, 

 a more perfect method, and analyzing six 

 kinds of tea some of the very highest, oth- 

 ers of the very lowest grades he arrives at 



the result that the amount of theine in these 

 varies very little from 2.08 to 2.44 and 

 that it increases regularly, with one excep- 

 tion, with the quality of the tea ; while the 

 amount of ash given by each kind regularly 

 decreases from 6.1 to 5.*7 per cent, from the 

 highest to the lowest grade. These differ- 

 ences, however, being very small, Markovni- 

 koff supposes that the quality of tea depends, 

 not at all or only a very little, upon the 

 amount of theine, and far more on the quan- 

 tity of tannic acid and aromatic oils it con- 

 tains ; but that, on the whole, teas made 

 from younger leaves contain more theine 

 than those from older leaves. 



Do Lightning-Rods attract? The old 



dogma that a lightning-rod no more attracts 

 electricity than an umbrella attracts rain, is 

 not strictly exact for, while the umbrella 

 has no influence on the course of the de- 

 scending rain-drops, it is certain that the 

 presence of a conductor very materially 

 changes the earthward course of the electric 

 fluid. The Vice-President of the British 

 Meteorological Society, Dr. R. J. Mann, in 

 a letter to the London Times, states as fol- 

 lows the rationale of the action of lightning- 

 rods in protecting buildings : 



" A conductor in the near presence of a 

 charged thunder-cloud becomes inductively ex- 

 cited, a very strong charge of the opposite kind 

 of electricity to that in the cloud being drawn 

 to the top of the rod. When this state of things 

 has been brought about, there certainly is a 

 stronger tendency for a spark or flash to pass 

 across the intervening air-gap than there would 

 be in the absence of any such inductive disturb- 

 ance. The electricians who still hold this view 

 [namely, that the lightning-rod's attraction is 

 equal to the ' attraction' of an umbrella] would, 

 nevertheless, hesitate to carry their argument 

 home to its ultimate conclusion by saying that 

 there is no attraction between the outer and the 

 inner coating of a Leyden-jar immediately be- 

 fore the electric forces shatter the glass to effect 

 the discharge of the jar. It is indeed almost uni- 

 versally held that the charge of a Leyden-jar is 

 chiefly due to the attraction of the severed elec- 

 tric forces exerting themselves to unite through 

 the insulating barrier of the glass. The charge 

 in the outer coating of the jar comes up from the 

 earth under what, in familiar terms, can hardly 

 be called anything else but the ' attraction ' of 

 the inner charge." 



Cooking. Nothing, probably, has more 

 direct influence over our physical and moral 

 well-being than the preparation of the food 



