May 29, 189T.J 



SCIENCE. 



303 



other material, moatly carbon, in which it is not only lost, but 

 deodorized. The breeze and ashes find a ready sale among the 

 brickmakers, but there is still a better outlet for them. By mixing 

 them with pitch they can be pressed into briquettes and used for 

 steam raising. It can scarcely be contended that these briquettes 

 are equal to those made from fresh Welsh coal, but they are very 

 fair, and can be sold at a reasonable price. The liquid pitch 

 incloses any objectionable elements they may contain, and the re- 

 sult is that they are inodorous. Another material of value found 

 among dust is paper. Immense quantities of this are collected, 

 and can be used over again for the manufacture of common brown 

 paper for wrapping parcels. After being dried to remove the 

 dust, and passed through the beaters to reduce it to pulp, it be- 

 comes as clean and as sweet as when it came home from the gro- 

 cer's or draper's. Straw can be similarly utilized for straw- 

 boards. 



We recently had an opportunity of inspecting the company's 

 premises, and feel sure that a short account of them will interest 

 our readers. It is an important feature of the process that it is 

 almost entirely mechanical, as nine-tenths of the material is never 

 touched by hand. The dust as it arrives is tipped into a rotating 

 cylindrical sieve. This runs on a horizontal axis, and is twelve 

 feet in diameter by twelve feet long. The meshes are formed of 

 bars three inches apart, and the progress of the tailings is regu- 

 lated by an internal worm, which obliges them to make about 

 three circuits of the screen before they can escape. A large ex- 

 haust pipe, operated by a powerful fan, draws all the floating dust 

 and small particles forwards, and delivers them into the closed 

 ashpit of a steam boiler. The tailings are mostly bulky articles; 

 the paper, rags, and straw usually roll into, bdlls, although a good 

 deal of small escapes through the meshes. Each thing that comes 

 out is thrown on to its proper heap, while the rubbish for which 

 no use can be found is sent to be ground under edge runners, as 

 will be explained presently. 



The articles that pass through the meshes are raised by an ele- 

 vator, and delivered to a second rotating screen fifteen feet long, 

 six feet in diameter, and an inch and a half mesh. The tailings 

 from this are first subjected to a blast, to take out light paper and 

 straw, and are then dropped on to a revolving sorting table, fif- 

 teen feet in diameter. A boy sits beside it, and picks out every 

 thing of value as it passes him, such as bottles, glass, iron, bones, 

 etc. The rubbish, such as animal and vegetable refuse and broken 

 crockery, he allows to go past him to the grinding mill. Here 

 every thing for which no use can be found is reduced to a dry 

 powder, which appears able to absorb all the offensive elements 

 and render them sweet. There are no heaps labelled " miscella- 

 neous" in these works to distract the manager and breed a nui- 

 sance. Every thing that is doubtful goes into the mill, which is 

 the pot au feu of the establishment. When it comes out it is no 

 longer recognizable. The mixture is carried back and put into the 

 first screen to be again sorted. 



Every thing that will pass through an inch and a half mesh 

 falls from the second screen on to a travelling band, which deliv- 

 ers into a third screen fifteen feet by six feet, covered with two 

 meshes, half an inch and three-eighths of an inch. What passes 

 through the former is called ashes, and through the latter breeze. 

 The tails go for steam generating. The ashes are used to mix 

 with clay for brickmaking, and the breeze for burning in the 

 clamps, unless, as indicated above, they are pressed into briquettes, 

 which, of course, fetch a better price. The ashes and breeze pass 

 over a fine shaking-screen, which takes out every thing below an 

 eighth of an inch. This is valuable as manure, being the greater 

 part of the animal and vegetable matter ground up in the mill. 



Having traced the dust through its entire passage we must re- 

 turn and notice some of the tailings. As we have already said, 

 •every thing for which an immediate use cannot be found is de- 

 stroyed. At present straw falls into this category, although the 

 success of foreigners in the manufacture of straw-boards leads to 

 the hope' that that manufacture may be eventually established 

 here. The straw is all burnt with special precautions to render 

 the smoke inoffensive. An externally fired cylindrical boiler has 

 two grates; on the larger of these the straw is burned, while on 

 the smaller there is a breeze fire through which the gases from 



the straw are passed to complete the combustion. The paper is 

 re-made on the premises. This seems a curious industry to carry 

 on in Chelsea, but a well has been sunk into the gravel, and an 

 ample supply of water has been obtained to keep three beaters 

 and one paper machine at work. This is the most valuable by- 

 product of all. The special value of the process is, however, that 

 it enables the paper to be cleansed immediately, instead of being 

 retained until a market can be found for it. 



The works naturally consume a good deal of steam, particularly 

 for the paper- making, and this accounts for much of the fine fuel. 

 Indeed, it is conceivable that in any general extension of the sys- 

 tem it might be worth while to use all the fuel on the premises in 

 winter for the production of electric lighting currents. The total 

 cost of handling would thus be avoided, and possibly a saving of 

 the ratepayers' money effected. To prevent the evolution of 

 smoke and any nuisance that might arise from the nature of the 

 fuel, the five boilers of the works have their smoke drawn by an 

 exhaust fan through scrubbers, in which it is thoroughly washed 

 before it is delivered into the air. The three locomotive boilers 

 are worked with forced draught, by which all the floating dust 

 collected from various parts of the works is thoroughly burned 

 up. 



The works have already been in operation for nearly two years, 

 and during that time they have grown up to the present state as 

 the results of prolonged experiments, in the course of which five 

 thousand loads have been treated. Difficulties, often quite unex- 

 pected, have been found and met, and new devices have had to be 

 produced as time went on. At present the works are dealing 

 with thirty-five loads a day from Kensington and Westminster 

 parishes, and are on a sufficiently extensive scale to show what 

 the process will do. They are exciting a great amount of atten- 

 tion all over the country, and many parishes are watching them 

 with interest. The disposal of dust is undoubtedly one of the 

 greatest problems of the day, and the process patented by the 

 Refuse Disposal Company solves the question from a sanitary point 

 of view, but of course it would want an examination of their 

 books to decide the exact economic value of the process. 



HEALTH MATTERS. 

 Pathogeny of Diabetes. 



BouCHAED has stated that there are no fewer than twenty-seven 

 theories of the cause of diabetes. None are entirely satisfactory. 

 The most important fact discovered in recent years, says the 

 British Medical Journal, is that diabetes follows extirpation of 

 the pancreas in animals, and numerous clinical observers have 

 since then noted pancreatic disease in conjunction with glycosu- 

 ria. V. Mering and Minkowski, with most praiseworthy scientific 

 reserve, have abstained from formulating any theory to explain 

 the undoubted fact they have put upon record, and Lepine has 

 discovered an additional fact in relation to pancreatic extirpa- 

 tion and diabetes, which must be taken into account when the 

 true explanation of these phenomena is forthcoming. Healthy 

 blood possesses what he terms glycolytic powers. Fresh blood 

 contains a certain percentage of sugar. If the same blood be al- 

 lowed to stand at the body temperature for an hour before it is 

 examined, a very considerable portion (20 to 40 per cent) of this 

 sugar has disappeared. This number (20 to 40) may be taken as 

 the glycolytic power of healthy blood. 



It is considered that this sugar-destroying power is due to a fer- 

 ment present in the corpuscles, but especially in the white cor- 

 puscles, as the glycolytic power of the chyle is as great as that of 

 the blood, and the portions of the blood richest in leucocytes are 

 richest in the ferment, which may be dissolved out from them by 

 salt solution. In cases of diabetes the glycolytic power of the 

 blood falls to 5, 2, or even 1. In animals without a pancreas 

 there is a similar drop. The pancreas thus appears to be the 

 chief source of the ferment. 



Lepine believes that the activity of a pancreatic cell is bipolar; 

 by its internal extremity it pours the pancreatic juice into the 

 ducts of the oi'gan, and by its basal extremity it pours into the 

 venous blood and lymph the glycolytic ferment. The absence or 



