Short Papers and Notes. hi 
This mode of treatment is not to be sneezed at, although it may 
probably make the patient sneeze. 
Diving Perils. 
When the P. and O. Company’s ship “ Ava” was wrecked on 
the coast of Ceylon, a very expert diver, Pound by name, was 
employed to raise £220,000 in bullion, which had gone down 
with the wreck. Pound, attired in the ordinary gutta-perch diving 
suit, had made his way into the saloon of the sunken vessel, when, 
to his horror, he saw a huge ground-shark come sailing in at the 
door. The diver instantly, and with marvellous presence of mind, 
lay motionless. For ten minutes the shark moved round and 
round the saloon. Pound expected, from the manner in which 
the deadly monster fixed his cold, green eyes upon him, that he 
would presently turn over (a shark always turns on its back when 
attacking) and make a rush at him. But after it had spent over 
ten minutes in the saloon, it made its way out. Had the fish 
made the slightest puncture in the gutta-percha suit, the diver 
would have been drowned. Pound ever afterwards carried with 
him a long dagger. Altogether he spent 850 hours under water 
while engaged in raising the bullion from the “ Ava.” 
The Megion of Fce. 
According to intelligence received at Hamburg, advices from 
the waters of Spitzbergen now confirm the former news from Ice- 
land and from the mouth of the Petchora, on the Siberian coast, 
to the effect that the ice in the Arctic Sea has this year extended 
unusually far to southward. Spitzbergen, the sealers report, was 
found to be surrounded with an ice-belt five to eight miles broad, 
and there was firm pack ice from Hope Island to Forland, about 
fifty-six miles. The great bays on the Storfjord Hornsund, Bell- 
sund, and Isfjord were quite inaccessible, and the sealers, after 
waiting all the spring and most of the summer, returned at the 
end of August, as there was no prospect of the Polar ice dividing. 
An Electric Sword. 
A gentleman of Shanghai has, after considerable experiment- 
ing, invented a new and deadly weapon. This is an electric 
sword, which, when the point touches the party attacked, sends a 
powerful shock through him, and, if not immediately killing, will 
at least put him hors-de-combat. The sword is an ordinary military 
sabre, but along its whole length is let in a fine platinum wire, 
which ends at the foil of the weapon. A small but very powerful 
storage battery is carried strapped about the waist, much the same 
