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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



was indeed rare that any Avoodchuck 

 to which they were applied ever le- 

 ported himself again. Professor Storer 

 also describes some experiments he 

 made in burning sulphur in the bur- 

 rows, with special expedients for insur- 

 ing more rapid and perfect combustion 

 of the sulphur; these promised fairly 

 well. Mr. Henry Stewart has described 

 in the Country Gentleman an eflfectual 

 method of destroying woodchucks with 

 blasting powder or dynamite. 



Evolution in Lamps. — The story 

 of lamps from Herodotus down to 1830, 

 Mr. Henry C. Mercer says, in an instruc- 

 tive study on Light and Light Making 

 in the contributions of the Bucks Coun- 

 ty (Pa.) Historical Society, is not one 

 of development. In principle and form 

 they remain the same, whether as the 

 tin cylindrical or boat-shaped cups on 

 candlestick pedestals and the roimd tin 

 cups with hemispherical lids, or the lid- 

 less cups resting on wooden stands such 

 as were recently rescued by the author 

 from the garret rubbish of old Bucks 

 County. And before Herodotus, as we 

 follow the lamp back into the tombs of 

 the Old World, we find the boat-shaped 

 form of earthenware preceding the boat- 

 shaped form of iron and possibly even 

 that of bronze. The chalk-cup lamp 

 found by Canon Greenwell in the neo- 

 lithic flint mines at Grimes Graves, Eng- 

 land, perhaps the oldest wick-floating 

 lamp in the world, is not essentially dif- 

 ferent from the oyster shell filled with 

 lard and provided with wicks that may 

 be found among Virginia negroes to- 

 day. The Egyptian, Grecian, Phoeni- 

 cian, and Roman lamps, as they have 

 been found in the tombs and as we see 

 them in the museums, are not unlike 

 the lard lamps that were most in use 

 early in the nineteenth century. Then 

 crude grease gave way to sperm oil and 

 lard oil, with especial adaptations of 

 the lamps that made them more con- 

 venient and improved the light; and 

 burning fluids that were convenient and 

 clean and gave a brilliant light, but 

 were dangerous; and kerosene, with 

 other improvements in the lamps and 

 refinements in the oil that enabled it to 

 give the most perfect artificial light yet 

 found and to keep up the fight for 

 quality with gas and electricity — all 

 these having come in within the life- 



time of men still among us. Besides 

 the old lamps, our ancestors had can- 

 dles, molded when the price of tin, the 

 material for the molds, did not forbid 

 the luxury, and before them tallow 

 dips; a suspended wick was dipped into 

 a pot of hot tallow, on a cold day, and 

 the operation was repeated till layer 

 after layer of grease hardened, and the 

 candle was thick enough. These can- 

 dles were, however, troublesome in hot 

 weather, on account of their propensity 

 to yield to the temperature and fall 

 over. " Who shall say, however, that 

 candle-dipping is older than molding, 

 when we know . . . that they molded 

 candles in County Gahvay, Ireland, in 

 late years by punching holes in peat 

 and pouring in tallow on the down- 

 hung wick of twisted fiax fiber?" The 

 Irish had, too, as had the negroes, the 

 rush light, a greased rush set in a hole 

 in a wooden block serving as a candle- 

 stick; or rushes joined in a triple twist 

 which flies apart when lighted, increas- 

 ing the blaze. From this Mr. Mercer 

 passes to forms of candlesticks and 

 torches and cressets and methods of 

 producing fire, whither we can not fol- 

 low him, for the multitude of details he 

 notices, which will not bear abstracting. 



Inconsistent Philozoists. — In his 

 address at the opening of the physio- 

 logical and pathological laboratories at 

 Belfast, Ireland, Lord Lister took oc- 

 casion to give some illustrations, drawn 

 from practice, of the value of patho- 

 logical research. " There are people," he 

 said, " who do not object to eating a 

 mutton chop — people who do not even 

 object to shooting a pheasant with a 

 considerable chance that it may be 

 only wounded and may have to die after 

 lingering in pain, unable to obtain its 

 proper nutriment — and yet who con- 

 sider it something monstrous to intro- 

 duce under the skin of a guinea-pig a 

 little inoculation of some microbe to 

 ascertain its action. These seem to 

 me to be most inconsistent views. If 

 these experiments upon the lower ani- 

 mals were made for the mere sport of 

 the thing, they would be indeed to be 

 deprecated and decried; but if they are 

 made with the wholly noble object of 

 not only increasing human knowledge, 

 but also of diminishing human suffer- 

 ing, then I hold that such investiga- 



