April 4, 1895] 



NA TURE 



539 



lation until we had been taught by necessity, by the evils 

 attacking our military forces, and the remedies that were 

 adopted, to confront those evils ; and the result of the last 

 forty years of sanitary exertion on the part of civil engineers, is 

 one of the most splendid triumphs in the history of any pro- 

 fession which has adorned this country. You have done what 

 many a continental nation wishes it could imitate you in doing. 

 You have driven cholera from your shores. It can no longer 

 make any impression upon us, and year by year the health of 

 the population grows, the sanitary reforms increase, and you 

 have converted all those who once doubted to believe in the 

 sanitary character of the maxims which you inculcate and the 

 methods which you propose. 



Major Cardew's report on the circumstances attending the 

 accidents which have lately occurred in London, in connection 

 with electric light main>, has been published in a Parliamentary 

 paper. The accidents were of two kinds — those due to severe 

 electric shocks caused by strong electrification of the surface of 

 the ground, and those resulting from explosions in the street 

 boxes through which the electric light mains run. In the City 

 cases investigated by Major Cardew, the immediate causes of 

 the accidents were : the breaking down of the insulation of a 

 high pressure main in a street box, causing the formation of a 

 powerful electric arc between the outer conductor of ttiis main 

 and the end of an iron pipe, forming a conduit for the mains, 

 which projected into this box, and the consequent charging of 

 this pipe to a dangerous extent ; and the presence of gas in the 

 Electric Light Company's pipes and street boxes to an amount 

 which formed a highly explosive mixture afterwards fired by the 

 electric arc. In the case of explosions in the St. Pancras dis- 

 trict, it was suggested that the explosive gas was derived from 

 the sewers, and also that it was hydrogen generated by electro- 

 lytic action. Major Cardew could find, however, no trace of 

 such action, and, after careful consideration of the evidence and 

 his own investigations, he concludes that the explosions were 

 caused by the firing of a mixture of coal-gas and air by an 

 electric spark. No time should, therefore, be lost in removing 

 these two existing causes of danger, namely, the possibility of 

 an accumulation of coal-gas in the conduits and that of the 

 occurrence of an electric spark at the mains, whether the mains 

 be insulated or of bare copper strip, such as is used by the St. 

 Pancras Vestry. This Vestry has previously had their attention 

 drawn to the necessity of efficient ventilation, but have lailed 

 to remedy the defects. The inquiry elicited the fact that there 

 are only eleven ventilating pipes and three ventilating covers to 

 street boxes for a total length of six and a half miles of conduit, 

 a proportion quite inadequate for the immediate escape of gas 

 from the conduits. Major Cardew recommends that accumula- 

 tion of gas should be prevented by thorough ventilation, by 

 making the sides and bottoms of street boxes impervious to 

 gas, and by filling up the boxes as far as practicable with in- 

 combustible material. It is to be hoped that the Board of 

 Trade will see that his recommendations on this and other 

 sources of danger are acted upon. 



The New York Academy of .Sciences, on Wednesday, 

 March 13, repeated the experiment, begun last year, of giving 

 an annual exhibition, with very gratifying results. Numerous 

 scientific instruments were exhibited ; the apparatus which 

 excited most general interest being one for testing and photo- 

 graphing the voice. 



A MEKTING of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers will 

 be held on Wednesday evening, April 24, and Friday evening, 

 April 26, at 25 Great George Street, Westminster. The discussion 

 will be resumed, on the Wednesday evening, upon the governing 

 of steam engines by throttling and by variable expansion, by 



NO. 1327, VOL. 51] 



Captain H. Riall Sankey. The third report to the Alloys Research 

 Committee will be presented by Prof. W. C. Roberts- Austen, 

 C.B., F.R.S., and also appendices to it on the elimination of 

 impurities during the process of making "best selected' 

 copper, by Mr. Allan Gibb, and on the pyrometric examinatioi> 

 of the alloys of copper and tin, by Mr. .\lfred Stansfield. The 

 anniversary dinner will take place on Thursday evening, 

 April 25. 



The New York signal service office, a branch of the United 

 States weather bureau, has just been removed from the Equit- 

 able building. No. 120 Broadway, which has been its head- 

 quarters for twenty-four years, to the new Manhattan Life Insur- 

 ance Company's building. No. 66 Broadway, which is now one 

 of the highest buildings in the world. The bureau will occupy 

 the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third stories in the 

 tower, and the observations will be made at a height of 356- 

 feet above the street, or 3S0 feet above tide water. The old 

 quarters were only 1S5 feet from the street. The equipment 

 will all be new, and will include electric signal lights, which 

 can be seen as far as Asbury Park and Fire Island. When the 

 weather bureau was established in 1870, it occupied the top 

 floor of a building in Wall Street for a few months. On the 

 completion of the Equitable building, that was selected as then 

 the highest in the city, but the rapid growth of tall ofiice build- 

 ings all around has made it undesirable as an observing 

 station. Even the present lofty quarters will soon be over- 

 topped by the building of the American Surety Company, 

 twenty-seven stories high, on the corner of Broadway and Pine 

 Streets, between the Equitable and the Manhattan buildings. 



Extensive geological researches have been made by Russian 

 mining officers, as well as by professors of the Tomsk univer- 

 sity, in connection with the Siberian railway, which, as is 

 known, has already been completed as far as the Irtysh, 

 opposite Omsk. Numerous layers of coal have been found in 

 the basin of the Irtysh, but none of then have any industrial 

 value. Rich palasontological collections, which very well 

 characterise the age of the coal-bearing deposits of the Kirghiz 

 Steppe, have, however, been made out at Bez-tyub?. The best 

 coal was found at Kuu-cheku, 40 miles from Karaganda,, 

 but it is too far from the railway (375 miles) to have an 

 immediate practicil value. The great difficulty which the 

 builders of the railway have to contend with is the total 

 absence of building stone in these lowlands, covered with clays 

 and sands. Thus, for the building of the brid^je over the 

 Irtysh, near Omsk, new carlies had to be opened higher up the 

 river, but the cost of extraction and transport was so great 

 that most of the stone required for the bridge is brought by 

 rail from Chelyabinsk, a distance of nearly 50J miles. 



The Society of Naturalists at the St. Petersburg University 

 which celebrated last year its twenty-fifth anniversary, has 

 issued an excellent volume containing a review of its five- 

 and-twenty years' activity. Each branch (zoology, physiology, 

 botany, and geology) is treated by a specialist, and the reviews 

 show at a glance what has been done in each of these 

 divisions of science ; while the work of botanical, zoological, 

 &c., exploration of the Russian Empire which has been 

 accomplished by members of the Society, is represented on 

 two maps. It is sufficient to say that the White Sea, the 

 Caspian Sea, the Aral Caspian and the Altai expeditions, 

 which have so often been mentioned in these columns, the 

 Crimea and the Neva Permanent Committees, and the 

 Solovetsky biological stations, are the work of the Society. The 

 volume is adorned by a good portrait of the late Prof. K. Th. 

 Kessler, the founder of the Congresses of the Russian Naturalist, 

 and Doctors, and also of the Societies of Naturalists at all the 



