THE AU STEAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACY. 
115 
Me. William T. Evans reports, in the British Medical Journal , 19tli Decem- 
ber, 1885, a case of a newly-born nursing infant which was fatally poisoned 
by opium given to the mother for after pains. 
To a correspondent who asks about Chinese opium-smoking — i.e. f as to 
the kind of pipes they use, how they prepare or mix the crude opium, etc. — the 
Scientific American replies as follows : — The essential part of the pipe is the 
head or bowl, made generally of terra cotta, but capable of being produced 
from a variety of materials. This bowl, on its outer surface, is provided with 
a small aperture, measuring, perhaps, one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, 
round which the product is placed. On the side of the bowl opposite to this 
aperture it is fixed to the tube through which the smoke is conducted to the 
mouth. This tube, of bamboo or any hollowed -out wood, is from 12 to 16 inches 
long from the bowl to the mouth-piece, but in the Chinese pipes it is mostly 
prolonged for from 4 to 6 inches beyond the bowl in the direction opposite the 
mouth-piece. The Chinese use a mixture of opium with sam-shu (a variety of 
gin), made up in the consistency of treacle. The ordinary pharmacopceial extract 
may be used. 
An electrician asserts that in bodies in which life is not extinct, the tem- 
perature rises upon the application of an electric current, but never in the case 
of actual death. This fact supplies a test for use in cases where life is 
suspected to remain in persons apparently dead. 
An ingenious Japanese has discovered a process of making paper from sea- 
weed. It is thick in texture, and sufficiently transparent to be substituted for 
window glass. When coloured, it makes an excellent imitation of stained glass. 
The methods hitherto employed of obtaining phosphoric acid from 
phosphorus are dangerous, complex, and costly. Mr. Adolph Sommer, of the 
University of California, has invented a process of doing it with safety and 
despatch. A glass jar with its bottom removed is placed inverted in a 
cylindrical vessel. Resting on the orifice of the jar is a common earthenware 
flower-pot, in which is placed a funnel with its narrow end reaching through 
the jar into the vessel beneath. A hole is drilled into the bottom of the jar, 
which is then glued on with a strip of paper. The inverted orifice of the jar 
is fitted with a perforated caoutchouc stopper. By means of a bent tube water 
is admitted through the hole in the bottom of the jar into a part of the space 
between the jar and the flowerpot. The remainder of this space is filled with 
carbonic acid. Pieces of phosphorus are placed in the funnel, among which is 
inserted the bulb of a thermometer. The presence of the carbonic acid allows 
this to be done with safety. The water rises by capillary attraction up the 
sides of the flower-pot and oxidises the phosphorus, the resulting liquid dropping 
into the vessel beneath. This operation is performed at a temperature of 
35deg. C. The liquid, which is composed of a mixture of phosphoric and 
phosphorus acid, is heated to 190deg. C., when the phosphorus acid is converted 
into phosphoric acid and hydrogen phosphide, the latter being given off in 
bubbles. 
It is usually imagined that cold is pretty fatal to the diseased germs and 
bacteria, but the real fact, as brought out by many experiments, is, that cold 
merely arrests development, and does not kill like heat. Professor M‘Hendrick 
cooled fluids containing bacteria 150deg. below the freezing point, and when he 
allowed the fluids to thaw discovered life in them still. In the same way, even 
on higher animals, the effect of cold as contrasted with heat is arrestive rather 
than destructive. Thus frogs have been kept frozen 12deg. below the freezing 
point for half an hour, and reduced to a condition of apparent death, but on 
slow thawing they recovered. 
