POPULAR MISCELLANY, 



571 



platinum in some form serve as the wick of 

 his lan:p, to be made luminous by the cur- 

 rent. But, this failing to meet his require- 

 ments, he cast about for other materials. 

 He tried carbon in various shapes, and at 

 length hit upon one form of it which he 

 thinks promises to solve his problem suc- 

 cessfully. He cuts out a slender piece of 

 paper from cardboard, in the shape of a 

 horseshoe, about one inch and a half long, 

 and not thicker than a knitting-needle. This 

 is then carbonized by pressing it between 

 metal plates, which are raised to a high 

 temperature. This little slender carbon- 

 loop, which preserves its fibrous character, 

 so as to make it somewhat elastic, is clamped 

 to the conducting wires, at each end, and is 

 then introduced into a little glass globe, two 

 or three inches in diameter, which is exhaust- 

 ed of air, and immediately sealed up. By im- 

 provements in the Sprengel pump, Mr. Edi- 

 son claims to get a vacuum so perfect that 

 but one millionth of the air remains in it. 

 As the current passes through the carbon it 

 heats it to a glowing whiteness, so that it 

 gives out a very pleasant, moderate light. 

 These lamps, it is said, can be made very 

 cheaply, and it is claimed that thus far the 

 carbon filaments withstand the influence of 

 the current and promise to be permanent. 

 It would, of course, be premature to pass 

 judgment upon that which time alone can 

 determine. 



ibont Snakes. — The question how snakes 

 progress is answered by the books in a way 

 satisfactory to many minds, but Mr. H. F. 

 Hutchinson, who writes about them in a 

 recent number of "Nature," takes some 

 exceptions to the usual explanation. He 

 seems to have been a careful observer of 

 their habits, and concludes that terrestrial 

 snakes move in one or the other of the 

 following ways: " 1. On smooth, plane sur- 

 faces, by means of their rib-legs ; e. g., the 

 boa. 2. Through high grass, by a rapid, 

 almost invisible, sinuous onward movement, 

 as the hydrophidfc in water ; e. g., the rat- 

 snake. 3. Climbing trees, or ascending 

 smooth surfaces by erecting their abdom- 

 inal scales, or using them to produce a 

 vacuum, as lizards do their foot-scales for 

 ascending smooth surfaces ; e. g., tree-snakes 

 and cobras." Mr. Hutchinson captured a 



snake nine inches long, with a head less 

 than half an inch broad, and presented it 

 with a frog two inches long and one broad. 

 The snake saluted the frog by seizing it by 

 the nose. The animal made desperate at- 

 tempts to shake it off, but in vain, and all 

 the while the process of deglutition (?) was 

 o-oing on, or rather the snake was slowly 

 but surely getting outside the frog. This 

 was accomplished by a sort of vermicular 

 process. The sharp little teeth were seen 

 to advance slightly, and then the whole 

 body wriggled up to a new hold on the frog. 

 In this way it very gradually disappeared, 

 the whole process lastiug half an hour. 

 The so-called snake-charming Mr. Hutchin- 

 son is confident is only clever legerdemain. 

 He describes the operation of skin-shedding 

 as follows : " The skin ready to be cast 

 yields round the snake's mouth only, and 

 remains adherent to the extremity of the 

 tail. As the animal advances, the caudal 

 extremity of the skin is inverted— that i?, 

 pulled inward — and so the process goes on, 

 and is completed by the tail passing through 

 the mouth of the skin ; and thus the direc- 

 tion of the abandoned skin is directly oppo- 

 site to the direction taken by the skin-cast- 

 ing snake — that is, if the mouth of the skin 

 lies east, the snake went out to the west." 



Improvements in Bntter-makiiig.— Eng- 

 lish farmers of late years have been giv- 

 ing more and more attention to the im- 

 provement of their dairy products, and in 

 the business of butter-making, especially, 

 have made some very considerable ad- 

 vances on the old-time practice. One of 

 the most recent and one of the most impor- 

 tant of these is the discovery of an odorless, 

 tasteless, and quite innocuous antiseptic that 

 proves to be an effectual preservative of 

 butter, without the use of salt, and without 

 the usual precaution of excluding it from 

 the air. To test its efficacy, the patent was 

 submitted to Mr. G. M. Allendor, a disinter- 

 ested expert in London, for trial. On the 

 24th of July last he treated a churning of 

 butter in accordance with the directions 

 specified, and, inclosing the butter in a mus- 

 lin cloth, placed it in a firkin without a par- 

 ticle of salt — every precaution being taken 

 that there should be no tampering with the 

 experiment. The firkin remained on the 



