March 16, 1871 | 
NATURE 
395 

WE learn from the British Medical Journal that Dr. Crace 
Calvert, of Manchester, having been requested to carbolise a 
quantity of charpie for the use of the ambulances at the seat of 
war, found that charpie was unsuitable for the purpose ; and after 
trying several textures, finally hit upon oakum as the most excel- 
lent. The oakum is first soaked in Burgundy pitch, and then 
rendered antiseptic by the addition of carbolic acid. This appli- 
cation has been a good deal used at the Manchester Infirmary, 
and with good results. 
A NEW undertaking of interest to the philosopher is the 
Arequipa Railway in Peru just opened for traffic. It is a great 
engineering work, carried out with English capital by Ameri- 
can enterprise, and it penetrates the western chain of the Cor- 
dillera of the Andes to reach the table lands of the interior, 
Arequipa, the terminus, being 7,800 feet above the level of the sea. 
Now at this elevation the rarefaction of the air is such that the 
ordinary workmen could not be employed, the suffering being in 
some cases intense. The works were, however, pushed on with 
vigour, and Mr. Meiggsimported above 16,000 labourers for his 
works, and for this purpose chiefly Aymara Indians from Bolivia. 
Mr. David Forbes, F.R.S., has, in his memoirs on the Aymaras in 
the Journal of the Ethnological Society, described the abnormal 
structure of the chests of these people, and it is astonishing to 
see them employed ina task which most effectually insures their 
subjugation. To foreign troops it was always difficult to scale 
these regions, but now the railway does the work, though to 
soldiers and passengers the journey is not always without dis- 
comfort. 
THe Bunya-Bunya (Araucaria Bidwilli), a native of the 
northern district of New South Wales, is of considerable interest, 
as being the only hereditary personal property possessed by the 
natives, who greedily devour the fruit, either raw, or roasted and 
made into cakes. This fruit is only plentiful every third year ; 
and at the proper season the aborigines assemble in considerable 
numbers for the purpose of obtaining it. Each tribe has its own 
set of trees, and each family its particular individuals among 
them ; and these are handed down from generation to generation. 
The right of ownership is almost universally respected ; but 
occasional depredations occur, when a fight ensues, the sympathies 
of the bystanders going with the lawful proprietor. 
WE learn from the Grocer that experiments recently carried on 
in India have proved that coffee pulp will yield, upon distilla- 
tion, 9 per cent. of its own weight of spirit, equal in strength to 
Scotch whisky. Nothing is said as to the flavour of this spirit 
in its raw state, but it appears to realise on the spot a price nearly 
equivalent to 4s. 6d. per gallon. 
AT the end of January, no date named, a shock of earthquake 
was felt in the Sanjak of Kartal, in Northern Asia Minor, which 
lasted several seconds and did slight damage. 
A LARGE and valuable deposit of limestone has been discovered 
by Mr. Read in the Sonthal Pergunnas, in Bengal, in the Banslo 
River. There is good communication with Calcutta by water or 
railway. 
Some fair pearls have been brought down to Durban, in Natal, 
from the River Vaal. They were found in mussels. 
NAvuRAt history and dancing and the Police. Such is our 
announcement from Madras. In consequence of a fatal case the 
Commissioner of Police has ordered that the dancing girls shall 
not dance in the Hindu temples with cobra snakes thrown round 
their necks. This will cause great disappointment to the pious 
votary and the interested amateur. It will tend, however, to 
lessen the reverence for the cobra, and may bring his tribe into 
greater danger of repression, 

IMAGINATION IN SCIENCE 
PROFESSOR Tyndall will eventually have much to 
_ answer for. He has lent his authority to the admission 
of imagination in the pursuit of science, and there is every 
prospect that people whose imaginative faculty is stronger 
than their habit of observation will give us all plenty to 
do. We shall not only have to question nature, but we 
shall have to eliminate imagination, and thus have two 
battles to fight for truth. Our medical friends have not 
always walked in the ways of rigid observation and induc- 
tion, but if any one desires to see how easy it is for the 
imaginative faculty alone to tell us all we require to know, 
we commend to his perusal the Modcle Daily Register, of 
Dec. 18th, 1870, in which there is a communication from 
Dr. Cochrane on the subject of yellow fever, well written, 
and interesting, and giving what may be called an account 
of yellow fever from the imaginative side. The author 
justifies his position by the example of European names, 
tells us candidly that he states only “ what he believes but 
does not know,” and then takes his flight into the un- 
known. He imagines “the yellow fever poison to be 
composed of living germs in innumerable number, living 
organisms of inconceivable minuteness, which eat, and 
drink, and multiply their generations under the sun, just 
as other living creatures do with which we happen to be 
familiar.” He connects his speculations in these matters 
with similar speculations about “contagia” and disease 
“germs” which are well known on this side of the Atlantic, 
and without paying any attention to facts regarding yellow 
fever and other diseases which are left untouched by any 
extant doctrine, he tells us truly that “the visions of 
modern science are more wonderful than the visions of 
Eastern fable.” This may be true, and the visions them- 
selves may be true; but, for people who feel that they 
must walk over the earth in search of truth, nutriment of 
this kind is by no means sufficient for mental sustenance, 
We have no desire to undervalue the importance of the 
imaginative faculty in scientific pursuits ; but papers such 
as the one before us raise some very important primary 
questions. Are we to live, scientifically, in the same way 
as alchemists and astrologers did in the Middle Ages? and 
are we to ignore all that Bacon and Newton have done 
for us? If it be true that there is no royal road to 
knowledge on the firm earth, it is certain there is no such 
road through the air. Let us use the imaginative faculty 
by all means ; but, in doing so, let us take our stand on 
the firm ground of the known before we venture ourselves 
into the unknown. 
THE ROVAL SOCIETY’S SOIREE 
E are indebted for the following account fof the most 
interesting objects exhibited at the Royal Society's sozré on 
Saturday evening last to the Stadurd, from which paper it is 
abridged. 
In the foremost ranks of notable attractions were the heliotype 
process of printing photographic plates for plates for book 
illustration, by Messrs. Edwards and Kidd; the solar eclipse 
photographs, and the twelve-inch equatorial telescope, with its 
photographic feed apparatus (Mr. Browning’s), by which they 
were obtained by Lord Lindsay ; the musical vibration figures 
shown in Mr. Spottiswoode’s new apparatus ; the electrical ex- 
periments of Mr. Varley; Commander Harvey's sea torpedo 
(made by Vavasseur); Dr. Norris’s soap-bubble experiments ; 
Mr. Haviland’s fine maps of the geographical distribution of 
cancer and heart disease (very recently published by Mr. Keith 
Johnston) ; the gold-hardening process, by Mr. Roberts of the 
Mint ; and Mr. Francis Galton’s pantagraph and resultant plates 
for the publications of the Meteorological Office. 
The soap- bubble experiments, performed with great adeptness 
by Dr. Norris, were intended to illustrate the physical principles 
concerned in the formation of rouleaux in the blood and in the 
passage of the corpuscles de ¢oude piéce through the walls of the 
minute blood-vessels, without rupture of the latter, as observed 
by Waller in 1846 and Cohnheim in 1867. <A film of soap 
solution was taken by a metal ring of a foot or more in diameter, 


