KNOV/LEDGE 



country may be gathered fro 

 changes and extensions pertai 

 The spring of last year sa^\ 

 preparations, and at tliat f i 

 located on tlu Ml' - f ' 

 in St. Martin i , 



working G- i 

 ^Mth 230 p 

 politai: 



ion of the 

 tral Office. 

 „ nt of the 



puei 



natK 



Pd ; 



tubt; 



■rease. It, how- 



which furnish 



lew, or fourth, 



burdened 



worked by a staff uf 3i attendants. 



"Within the past eighteen months 172 new -svires have 

 bejn erected, -is of them beiiv^ single-nc.dle circuits, 122 

 Morse sounder or printer circuits, and 2 Wheatstone 

 automatic circuits; 95 provincial towns and 77 metro- 

 politan offices are involved in these extensions. Besides 

 these, many existiag circuits have been duplexed, or their 

 carrj'ing capacity in some other way increased ; so that 

 at the present time there are altogether 908 sets of 

 apparatus, of which 151 are single-needles, 591 Morse 

 sounders and printers (307, or more than half of them, 

 being duplexed), 57 Wheatstone automatic instruments 

 (all of them duplexed), 18 quadrnplex instruments, and 4 

 AVTieatstone ABC instruments. Num 

 have also been made to the number of j; 

 The instrument-room as it existed la 

 capable of accommodating so large an hv 

 ever, contains a series of long tables 

 together 2,885 ft. of desk-space. A i 

 floor has been added, and its single 

 1,400 ft. of instrument-tables, which 

 already with 468 sets of apparatus working to the offices 

 in the metropolitan district. The staff has been 

 largely increased, and at the present time numbers nearly 

 two thousand. 



The large central hall, on the ground floor of the 

 building, has been appropriated for the pneumatic tubes, 

 the removal of which fi-om the instrument-room in- 

 creases the possible accommodation there very consider- 

 ably. 



The new wires which have been erected have been, in 

 the main, carried along the high roads, comparatively 

 few extensions having been made on the various railway 

 routes. "Road" wires now span the country in all 

 directions, the recent additions including eighteen wires 

 to the north, pursuing a path known as the east coast 

 route, through Biggleswade, Baldock, Peterborough, 

 Doncaster, Xewcastle, &c. One of these wires working 

 to Newcastle is of hard-drawn copper, the cost of which, 

 on account of its thinness, is about the same as that of 

 an iron wire, while the working capacity is considerably 

 higher. Mr. Preece, in a paper read at the recent meet- 

 ing of the British Association, ventured the opinion that 

 copper responds more readily to rapid changes of electric 

 currents than iron. He suggested that the magnetic 

 susceptibilit)- of the iron is the cause of this, the 

 magnetism of the iron acting as a kind of drag on the 

 currents. The paragraph in last week's " Miscellanea " 

 reveals that the copper wire is capable of transmitting 



hile an iron wire can only carry 



;■ north, known as the west coast 

 w ith eighteen wires, the road 



I \ AVeedon, Stafford, Nantwich, 



[. udon by -nh.it is called the 



II tin. u.h Slough, Reading, 



' I ' N 1, f.nd thence on to 



I I he Southwestern 



^ li-liur}, ^\here it 

 I , Plymouth, 



1 lit .smaller 

 1 d South- 

 1 of the 

 London in 



I. >N ( t the details 

 ir wirk has been 

 irds cf 20,000 

 I) those already 

 I r the auticipa- 

 ( u the numbei- 

 lismittLd will h- 



HUMAN REMAINS FOrXD NEAR 

 MEXICO. 



By Mariano de la Barcexa. 



■y, 18S4, some excavations were 

 us of dj-namite, at the foot of 



of 



at the 



IN the month of Jr 

 being made, by 

 the small hill known as "P</7o» de los Bams,'' some four 

 kilometres east of the City of Mexico. The excavations 

 were made with the object of qtiarrj-ing building stone 

 for the ^klilitnry Slmoting School, which is bein; 

 structed near tl;- 1'. r, n nr.l iiivIm- r'^;.- --ii] crvis 

 Colonel Dial \ ' 

 beginning of .■ i : • :iiiiong the 



rocks looseni.4 1;. i!m' >!;.■; ■':[!'.' -•!:!■ 1 ;ii^ \vi_-re to be 

 found, and he aci-ordinglv collected and delivered them 

 to the Minister of Public Works, Don Carlos Pacheco, 

 who appointed the writer to make a study of them. 

 The preliminarj- examination being made, I presented 

 them to the Mexican Society of Natural History, giving 

 at the same time public notice of so important a 

 discovery. 



Some days afterwards T explored the formation in 

 which the bones were fotmd, continuing my studies with 

 the co-operation of Don Antonio del Castillo, professor 

 ited to take jiart in my investi- 

 p a rei>ijrt which has lately been 



gations ; both 

 published 



The human 

 formed of silii 



5Ie: 



IS are firmly imbedded in a rock 

 ilcareous tufa, very hard and of a 

 The cranium, with the lower 

 and upper maxilla; and fragments of the collar-bone, 

 vertebra, ribs and bones from the upper and lower 

 limbs are exposed. The bones lie in disonler, proving 

 that the rock in which the skeleton was fnund suffered 

 an upheaval before consolidation, a circumstance which 

 an examination of the ground further verifies. The 

 bones present a yellowi.sh appearance, and the character- 

 istic aspects of fossilisation, it being noteworthy that 



