2 68 



HARDWICK&S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



cut down even with the ground and receive a dose of 

 liquid or other manure. Cattle eat it greedily, and it 

 is excellent for dairy cows as it does not flavour the 

 milk. I have seen it stated that the roughness of the 

 leaves makes it distasteful to cattle, but this is an 

 error. It is an invaluable food for pheasants, ducks, 

 and all kinds of fowl, and if chopped up for them 

 in that most useful instrument, Starritt's American 

 circular cutter, and mixed with barley meal or crushed 

 Indian corn, it fattens them rapidly, and saves a third 

 of the grain. I have had two of these mincing 

 machines, one large and the other small, both pur- 

 chased from Gilbertson & Page, Hertford. 



"Like all broad-leaved plants, which derive much 

 of their food from the air and the rain, comfrey grows 

 best wherever swedes and mangolds flourish, and 

 amply repays the expenditure of a fair supply of 

 manure. It has been stated that no manure is 

 wanted, but this, as regards all plants, is nonsense, 

 for in some way or other you must restore to the 

 soil what you have taken out of it, and root crops 

 especially exhaust the soil. Preserved as ensilage 

 prickly comfrey does not seem to have done very 

 well, and the product is unusually disagreeable in 

 smell. 



" It may be added that the common English com- 

 frey used to be employed as a poultice or to stop 

 bleeding, for it contains much mucilage. 



" I am, Sir, faithfully yours, 



" Kylemore. "Mitchell Henry." 



Dr. Fiordispini, Director of the Manicomio, the 

 great lunatic asylum of Rome, tells us that among a 

 staff of 327 persons in that establishment who are 

 engaged in watching and attending the insane 3 - c;8 

 per cent, have themselves become insane. This 

 amounts to 1 in 25 persons, while of the entire 

 population of Rome the proportion is only I in 585 ; 

 or otherwise stated, the attendants at the asylum are 

 23 times more liable to insanity than people outside. 

 Dr. Fiordispini connects this with the tendency to 

 imitation, or moral infection. The history of mankind 

 in all countries plainly demonstrates that moral 

 epidemics have prevailed either by imitation or some 

 influence that is very imperfectly understood. The 

 facts stated by Dr. Fiordispini plainly teach, that no 

 persons having even the remotest hereditary tendency 

 to insanity should seek employment in a lunatic 

 asylum. 



The Japanese are doing good service to science 

 and to themselves by the systematic study of earth- 

 quake movements, and the British Association is 

 co-operating with them. By suitable instruments, 

 seismographs, the movements of the earth are made 

 to describe themselves, to draw their own portraits 

 on suitable paper. These diagrams tell a great 

 deal, and to render them more expressive, artificial 

 earthquakes have been made by exploding dynamite 

 in the ground, dropping cannon-balls from various 



heights, and otherwise shaking the earth in a definite 

 manner, so as to compare the seismograph diagram 

 of an artificial disturbance of known character with 

 the natural disturbance, and thus lead on to explana- 

 tions of the natural phenomena. Last year eighty 

 natural earthquakes were specially studied by the 

 British Association Committee, the year before thirty- 

 nine, and the year preceding that twenty-six. The 

 Japanese have seismographs in their coal-mines as 

 well as above ground. The results are very interest- 

 ing, but too elaborate for me to attempt anything like 

 a general account of them here, beyond describing a 

 very practical application of these researches, viz., 

 the determination of how to construct a house which 

 shall resist earthquake motion. 



This has been done by resting the foundation on 

 cast-iron balls. At first 10-inch shells were used. 

 The record of a seismograph placed inside a house 

 thus constructed showed that although it was sub- 

 jected to considerable movement at the time of an 

 earthquake, all sudden motion had been destroyed. 

 The winds and other causes produced much more 

 serious movements than the earthquake. The house 

 was floating too freely. Then 8-inch balls were tried, 

 then i-inch, and finally the house was rested at each 

 of its piers on a handful of cast-iron shot of only 

 \ inch in diameter ; these shot rest between cast-iron 

 plates. The friction in this case was sufficient to 

 resist the disturbing agency of the wind, while the 

 earthquake movements, communicated of course to 

 the piers, merely rolled the shot under the foundation 

 of the house without moving the house itself. I 

 should add that the houses were not of the London 

 suburban jerry order of architecture, not with 9-inch 

 walls made of rotten bricks set in mortar made of 

 dusthole ashes, but were respectable wooden and 

 iron structures. As I have said before, we shall 

 some day take our turn in the matter of earthquakes, 

 and when we do the excessive population of suburban 

 London will be very much regulated, and " the en- 

 franchisements of leaseholds " will be radically 

 affected. 



Mr. A. Buchan's paper read to the British Asso- 

 ciation on the Rainfall of the British Islands from i860 

 to 1883 is very interesting. One of the most striking 

 facts brought forth is the quantity of rain that falls in 

 Glencoe, viz., 128J inches. This is the heaviest in 

 Scotland. The average in the regions of heaviest 

 rainfall, viz., Skye, and a large portion of the main- 

 land as far as Luys, on Loch Lomond, the greater 

 part of the Lake District, a long strip including the 

 more mountainous part of North Wales, and the 

 mountainous district to the south-east of Waies, is 

 So inches. The smallest rainfall is in the south-east 

 of England. The observations were made at 10S0 

 stations in England and Wales, 547 in Scotland, and 

 213 in Ireland. 



Weather prophets are usually very unfortunate ; 

 their failures are generally proportionate to their 



