July 12, 1877] 



NATURE 



207 



style, and the introduction of numerous carefully executed 

 maps and illustrations wherever opportunity is offered by 



the text. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 



[T/if Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions expressed 

 by his correspondents. Neither can he umiatake to return, 

 or to correspond tvith the writers of, rejected manuscripts. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communuations. 



The Editor urgently requests correspondents to keep their letters as 

 short as possible. The pressure on his space is so great that it 

 is impossible otherwise to ensure the appearance even of cotn- 

 munications containing interesting and novel facts.\ 



Soldiers' Rations 



In your issue for June 28 (p. 158) Mr. H. Baden Pritchatd 

 states in his article on "Soldiers' Rations," "And yet, as we 

 have said, with this apparently liberal feeding, our men do not 

 receive so much actual nourishment, or nitrogenous matter, as 

 the German soldier." 



My calculations, based on I'ror. Parkes' table of soldiers' 

 rations, and Prof. Frankland's experiments on food and urea, 

 give ihe following values of the several soldiers' rations : — 



Foot tODS. 



1. English Mililary I'rison ... 4,509 



2. English Soldier (Hun.c) ... ... ... 3,964 



3. Prussian ,, (War) 3,8l2 



4. French ,, (Ciiuiea) ... ... ... 3,683 



5. French ,, (Home) ... 3.58o 



6. French ,, (War) ... 3.S38 



7. Austrian ,, (Hume) ... ... ... 3,242 



8. Prussian ,, (on lie inarcli) ... ... 3,223 



Mean 



3.694 



As the average daily external work of a man is 353' 7S^ foot 

 tons, the efficiency of man regarded as a heat engine is 9'6 per 

 cent, of the internal work. 



An efficiency of 8 '2 per cent, can be obtained by engines 

 working at 40 lbs. pressure and steam cut off at half stroke ; so 

 that man regarded as a machine, does not occupy a very high 

 position. The explanation of this is, that man is not a machine ; 

 he is a machine tnaier. The mechanism of a cat or beetle is 

 vastly higher than that of man, and yet they are immeasurably 

 his inferiors. Saml. Haughton 



Trinity College, Dublin, July 7 



Printing and Calico Printing 



In your article on the Caxton Exhibition last week, there is 

 the remark that the beauty of execution in the specimens pre- 

 served to us of the work of the earliest known printers suggests 

 a doubt whether the date of the actual invention must not be 

 pushed back farther than the accepted one. But does that 

 follow ? Is not the beauty of the first printing simply the beauty 

 of the wood engraving of the time? an ait which had attained 

 an exquisite perfection before its application to movable type. 



That there should be doul.t and obscurity as to the date, 

 name, and claim of the first inventor can surprise no one who 

 will ask himself who, for instance, was the inventor of our 

 present mode of calico printing by roller ; and, if he cannot 

 answer, shall turn, as he has every right to do, to the current issue, 

 ninth edition, of the " Encyclop:edia Britannica " for the satis- 

 faction of his doubt. He wdl find there, in that long, elaborate, 

 and amply-illustrated article, not the bare mention of the name, 

 even (unless I have strangely missed what I expressly looked for) 

 of the otherwise remarkable man who conceived the idea, 

 mechanically wrought it out for his own immediate purpose, and 

 himself elaborated its application to the printing of calicoes — 

 ievolulic>nisirg that important branch of our industry — all well 

 within the lifetime of men not half a century old among 

 us I The Rev. Itaac Taylor — turning a moment from his own 

 researches into the Etruscan mysteiy — should be able to tell u... 

 in what precise year it was, alter 1840, that his father, Isaac 

 Taylor, the author of the "Natural History of Enthusiasm," 

 and a long series of subsequent works, sufficient alone for a 

 reputation of a high and lasting order — a teacher of teachers, the 



' "Animal Mechanics," p. 62. 



depth and extent of whose influence and the fulness of whose 

 intellectual stature have not yet been adequately recognised — 

 engraved on the roller illustrations for his new translation of 

 Josephus, undertaken in connection with Dr. Traill. The death 

 of his fellow-worker cut short that enterprise, but a portion of 

 the work appeared ; and I myself, as a boy, was often in the 

 little private workshop at Stanford Rives while this idea was 

 struggling on the turning-lathe, through the patient genius of its 

 author, for mechanical existence. In 1S55 or 1S56 I found him 

 superintending its actual application to the printing of calicoes 

 at Manchester. The discovery received the immediate and 

 inevitable compliment of piracy, and brought to him and 

 his loss instead of gain. But that within five-and-twenty years 

 his very natne should seem to have wholly dropped away from 

 what was undoubtedly his own unaided invention, and one withal 

 of so much national importance, and in an age of Ume-hght 

 pubhcity like ours, is almost a curiosity of injustice, and throws, 

 as I have said, a flood of light on a crowd of similar miscarriages 

 in the indifferent past. As a hundred years hence this also may 

 be beyond remedy, kindly assist me to arrest a moment the 

 remorseless tooth of All-Father Time by the insertion of this 

 contemporary note. Hkni;y Cecil 



Breigner, Bournemouth, July 9 



Stamping out Noxious Insect Life 



The subject of insect and germ life in its relation to 

 putrelaction and infectious disease is now assuming such import- 

 ance from the investigations and demonstrations of Dr. Tyndall, 

 Mr. Murray, and other scientific inquirers, that I Uiink you may 

 consider the following curious facts not imwurthy of space in 

 your journal. 



I observe in a report of Dr. Tyudall's lectuie on Germs, in 

 Nature, he refers particularly to the varying tenacity of life 

 which germs under certain conditions exhibit, and which he 

 refers to the period of incubation or stage of development up to 

 the stale of emergence as complete organisms, when they are 

 readily destroyed. He says : " We now turn to another aspect 

 of the question ; following the plain indications of the germ 

 theory of putrefaction, we sterilise in five minutes the very 

 infusions which, a moment ago, were described as resisting five 

 liours' boiUng. The germs are indurated and resistant, the adult 

 organisms which spring from them are plastic and sensitive in 

 the extreme. The gravest error ever committed by biological 

 writers on this question consists in the confounding of the germ 

 and its offspring. The active bacteria developed from those 

 obstinate germs are destroyed at a temperature of 140° Fahr. 

 Let us reflect upon these facts. For all known germs there 

 exists a period of incubation, during which they prepare them- 

 selves for emergence as the finished organisms, which have been 

 proved so sensitive to heat. If, during this period, and well 

 within it, the infusion be boiled for the fraction of a minute, 

 even before the boiling point is reached at all, the softened 

 germs which are then approaching their phase of final develop- 

 ment will be destroyed. Repeating the process of heating every 

 ten or twelve hours, each successive healing will destroy the 

 germs then softened, until after a sufficient number of heatings 

 the last living germ will disappear. If properly followed out the 

 method of sterilisation here described is infallible ; a temperature, 

 moreover, far below the boiling-point tufiices for sterilisalion." 



Now as the laws of nature apply to all magnitudes alike, 

 whether it be a grain of sand or the planet Jupiter, to the 

 various stages of incubation of the germs of bacteria or of 

 noxious insect life, I think I may claim some credit for having 

 slumblid upon, and for having applied on a practical and large 

 scale, a system for eradicating insect life in animals based on 

 this law of varying tenacity of life in germs and insects. More 

 than two years ago I advocated this system, and in September 

 last issued a circular, in which I stated that "a short time after 

 clip-day I dipped, by immersion, the young lambs, and I 

 repeated the same before harvest ; at the same time I made a 

 long narrow pen alongside the stackyard fencing, into which I 

 crammed all my old sheep as close together as possible. I 

 then, with an ordinary watering-pan, wtitered them all over with 

 diluted fluid ; the latter operation was completed in half an hour, 

 and the cost in material was le«s than one halfpenny per head, 

 the proportions in both cases being i to 100. Now for results ! 

 I lately minutely examined the whole of my sheep, for 

 the purpose of deciding if it was necessary to give them a final 

 diessing before October, and I can now frankly, and without 



