02 TRANSACTIONS. I9OI-2 



ers through a reducing valve so gradually that a large buoy 

 will burn night and day for three months without attention. 

 An ingenious invention in connection with this buoy is an 

 automatic cut-off that withdraws the supply of gas at short 

 intervals, so as to give the effect of an occulting light. This 

 result is secured by alternately filling and emptying a cham- 

 ber capped with a piece of flexible leather, and owes its 

 success to the extreme simplicity of the mechanism. With 

 this attachment there are three burners, which are extinguish- 

 ed, grouped about a small pilot burner, not affected by the cut 

 off, and which relights the outer jets as often as the gas 

 resumes its flow. 



Pintsch gas is largely used for lighting cars. The bril- 

 liant liofhts on the Canada Atlantic trains between here and 

 Montreal are Pintsch gas-lights, the tanks on the cars being 

 supplied from a gas works in Montreal. This gas is also 

 utilized in many small beacon lights. 



Many experiments have been tried in maintaining elec- 

 trically lighted buoys, and a dredged channel entering New 

 York harbour, Gedney channel, is equipped with electrically 

 lighted buoys, but the system has not proved an unqualified 

 success, as any damage to the cable extinguishes all the lights, 

 and the cost of maintenance has been excessive. 



A proposition has lately been made to safeguard the 

 River St. Lawrence, between Montreal and Quebec, by a 

 similar system of electrically lighted buoys. Any electrician 

 will tell you how extremely expensive the installation would 

 be, and how precarious the maintenance. The Department 

 sent the proposer of the scheme out on our steam tender this 

 winter, when we were saving our ordinary buoys from the 

 funning ice, and I expect, after what he saw there, we shall 

 hear nothing more of that scheme. 



We have had many interesting experiences with buoys 

 that have gone adrift from our Atlantic shore. It is nothing 

 unusual to hear of them anywhere out in the open Atlantic. 

 One has come back to us from Ireland, and we have heard of 



