JCLY 21, 1882.] 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



135 



^ 



^ti'tnre aniJ Slit t^OiSdip. 



We regret to annonnce tlie prcmatnre death, at the age of 32, of 

 the celebrated electrician, M. Antoine Breguet, of Paris. 



Messes. Felten axd Gcilleacsie give the following figures as 

 the relative resistances of equal lengths of rarious metals at the 

 same temperature and of the same section : — Copper, 15 ; phosphor 

 bronze, 6'5 ; Swedish iron, galvanised, 8"7 ; Bessemer Swedish steel, 

 jralvaniscd, 9 ; German charcoal iron, galvanised, 10 3 ; Siemens- 

 Martin iron, galvanised, 108; coke-iron, galvanised, 12; patent 

 cast steel, 13-7 to 15-2. 



A>" exhibition of life-saving apparatus of all kinds has been 

 opened in the Alexandra cPalace. The exhibition is divided into the 

 following six classes or sections: — (1) Railway safety appliances, 

 including continaons brakes, signalling, and point-locking apparatus, 

 switches, Ac, this being the leading feature ; (2) means for extin- 

 jmishing fires, and the rescue of people therefrom; (3) mining 

 t-afety. appliances; (-i) apparatus for all marine and inland water 

 emergencies; (.3) surgical and sanitary ; and (6) engineering and 

 miscellaneous safety appliances? _ 



Insclite. — We have received a letter from Dr. Fleming, the 

 inventor of this material, complaining of the 'criticism we made on 

 it a fortnight since.' He sent us fresh •specimens, which are cer- 

 rjiiuly an improvement on those we saw a few weeks since, but it is 

 ^till very far from being, in our opinion, of any practical utility. 

 Exception was taken to our assertion that the material would not 

 hold small screws, an assertion which we cannot' withdraw, inas- 

 much a.<i, although the screw bites well at. first, it can never be 

 driven fairly home. We believeth.it, as Dr. Fleming says, a supply 

 iif in^btors has been furnished to the Post-olBce, and they are 

 now ^dergoing a trial. ' There are other points we should like to 

 ref^ to, but we forbear, hoping that Dr. Fleming will be able to 

 q^rromo such practical ditficultics. 



Investigation.-; made in Germany concerning the comparative 

 vitality of children under various methods of feeding exhibit some 

 liecnliar -results. Thus, of 100 children nursed by their mothers, 

 only 18'2 died during the first year;, of those nursed by wet nurses, 

 29-33 died ; of those artificially fed, 60. died ; and of those brought 

 up-in institutions, 80 died to the 100. Again, taking 1,000 well-to-do 

 persons and 1,000 poor persons, there remained of the prosperous, 

 :ifter five years, 913, while of the poor only 655 remained alive ; 

 Hfter fifty years, there remained of the prosperous 557, and only 

 283 of the poor ; at seventy years of age there remained of the 

 prosperous 235, and but 65 of the poor. The total average length 

 of life among the well-off class wa3 found to be fifty years, as against 

 ihirty-two among the poor. 



Messes. Hebold & Gawalowski, of Brunn, make as follows a 

 strong, artificial parchment, impermeable by water, and capable 

 <jf serving for the diaphragm in osmotic operations on solutions of 

 impure sugar, ic. : — ^The woollen or cotton tissues are freed, by 

 washing, from the foreign substances, such as gum, starch, &c., 

 ■nhich may cover them. They are then placed in a bath slightly 

 <harged with paper pnlp ; and to make this pulp jienetrate more 

 • loeply, they arc passed between two rollers, which slightly compress 

 I liem. Tho principal operation consists in steeping the product for 

 .H few seconds in a bath of concentrated sulphuric acid, after which 

 it undergoes a series of washings in water and ammoniacal liquor, 

 until it has lost all trace of acid or base. It is then compressed 

 l)etween two steel rollers, dried between two others, covered with 

 felt, and finally calendered, when the sheets are fit for use. 



OnsEBVATiox.-i made by M. Rafford, a member of the Societo 

 d'Horticalture at Limoges, show that a castor-oil plant having been 

 placed in a room infested with (lies, they disappeared as by en- 

 chantment. Wishing to find tho cause, he soon found under the 

 castor oil plant a number of dead Hies, and a large number of bodies 

 tiad remained clinging to the under surface of tho leaves. It 

 would, therefore, appear that the leaves of the castor-oil plant give 

 '•ut an essential oil or some toxic principle which possesses very 

 strong insecticide qualities. Castor oil plants are in Franco veiy 

 much used as ornamental plants in rooms, and thoy resist very well 

 ▼ttriations of atmosphere and temporatiiro. As the castor-oil plant 

 is much grown and cultivated in all gardens, the Journal d Aijri- 

 culture points out that it would be worth while to try decoctions of 

 the leaves to destroy the green (lies and other insects which in 

 summer are so destructive to phints and fruit-trees. 

 ' The Amrta in Japan.'— This clever stroller's stock-in-trade con- 

 sists of a little bench, furnished with a lamp, some plastic sugar, 

 i red and blue pigments, a few twigs of split bamboo, and a pair of 

 I 'scissors. Taking a lump of the sugar in his hands, ho makes a 



funny speech to the particoloured little crowd, and ends by asking 

 what it is their pleasure he shall produce. " A dragon," shouts 

 some bold little beauty, while a murmur of approbation arises, and 

 every eye is fixed on the artist. Little by little, the terrible creature 

 grows out of tho paste, a collection of unrelated details at first, 

 which a few sudden touches complete as if by magic. Now some 

 one calls for a gourd, another for a tortoise, a third for a man on 

 horseback, and a fourth for a monkey swinging by its tail. It is a 

 contest between the children and the old man, but they cannot non- 

 plus him, try how they will. No matter what they call for, tho 

 ameya is equal to the occasion, and within three minutes his dex- 

 terous fingers conquer every dilficulty which his audience may pro- 

 pound. — ^Mr. Pidgeon, in " An Engineer's Holiday." 



On the 11th inst., Lieut. -Col. Webber. R.E., the President of the 

 Society of Telegraph Eng^ineers, held a reception at Chatham. 

 About 500 of the members attended, and were conducted in parties 

 of about twenty-five over- the various schools, ic, a short lecture 

 on submarine mines haring been previously delivered. by Major 

 Armstrong, R.E. The closing episodes'ina very .pleasant, day's ex- 

 cursion were the blowing down of a stockade by . 25 lb. of gun- 

 cotton, the explosion of a submarine mine containing 100 lb. of gun- 

 cotton in the Medway, and a subterranean mine of 1,0001b. of gun- 

 powder. As this was the first day of hostilities at Alexandria, 

 especial interest was attached to these experiments, and-everyone 

 present left with a very marked impression of the powers of these 

 materials, and of the vast superiority of gun-cotton over powder. 

 The sight of enormous columns of water in the one case, and of 

 earth and rocks in the other may, indeed, bo called magnificent. 

 Altogether it was an exceedingly enjoyable day, and the members 

 felt universally grateful to their guests. . , 



Notoriety. — The Guiteau case has brought out very strikingly 

 the passion for notoriety, which seems to be fast becoming the 

 disease of the modern worlcl, and'see'm^ likely to become one of its 

 great social forces, much as religions fanaticism was in the Middle 

 Ages. It is not until such an event as President Garfield's assas- 

 sination occurs that we get a realising sense of the burning desire 

 to escape from the ordinary obscurity of their lives by which tens 

 of thousands of persons are consumed, and the lengths they 

 are prepared to go, if need be, in absurdity,- to become known 

 or talked about. If- they cannot- accomplish < this by any act 

 of their own, they are only too glad to accomplish it by 

 connecting themselves in some manner, however queer or 

 grotesque, with some notorious person. If they cannot bo as 

 much talked about as Gniteau, they are made happy by being 

 able to retail Guiteau's talk. If they cannot have, like him, the 

 fame of being hanged, without the suffering'and the shame, they 

 are content to furnish a patent gallows, or make the rope, or 

 suggest a new device in knots, or in any manner whatever be 

 publicly mixed up with an affair about which everjbody is talking, 

 and to have the air of knowing something more abont it, bo it ever 

 so little, than other people. Of course this passion is fostered by 

 the publicity afforded by the newspapers, which, indeed, are to love 

 of notoriety" what the sun is to plants. That it will increase is very 

 certain, and that its power as a cause of crime as well as of folly 

 -will be recognised more fully as the years go on is, wo think, 

 equally certain. — The Kaiion. 



In the July number of tho American XaturalUt, Mr. Ivan Petroff, 

 in a valuable paper on the " Limit of the Inniiit Tribes on the 

 Alaska Coast," makes some important observations on the rate at 

 which shell-heaps nccnmnlate. He says: — " The time required for 

 the formation of a so-called layer of ' kitchen refuse ' fonnd under 

 the sites of Aleutian or Innuit dwellings I am inclined to think 

 less than indicated by Mr. Dall's calculations. Anybody who has 

 watched a healthy Innuit family in the process of making a meal on 

 the luscious echinus or sea urchin would naturally imagine that in 

 the course ofa month they might pile up a great quantity of spinous 

 debris. Both hands are kept busy conveying the sen fruit to the capa- 

 cious month; with a skilful combined action of teeth and tongtie. the 

 shell is cracked, tho rich contents extracted, and the former falls 

 rattling to the ground in a continuous shower of fragments until 

 the meal is concluded. \ family of three or fonr adults. _and 

 perhaps an equal number of children, will leave behind them n 

 shell monument of their voracity a foot or , eight-eon, inches in 

 height after a single meal. In localities in Princo William .'^ound 

 I had an opportunity to examine tho cnmp-sitcs of, sea-gUor hunters 

 on the coast contiguous to their hunting-grounds. Here they live 

 almost exclusively upon echinus, clams, and mus.tcls. which are con- 

 sumed raw in order to avoid building fires ami making smoke, and 

 thereby driving. tho sensitive soo-otter from the vicinity. The heaps 

 of refuse created under such circumstances during a single season 

 were truly astonishing in size. They will surely mislead the in- 

 genious calculator of the antiquities of shell heaps a thousand years 

 hence." 



