606 
EXTRACTS FROM A LECTURE ON STRYCHNINE. 
in particular, which, by way of distinction, I call semi-steel, 
being in hardness about midway between ordinary cast steel 
and soft malleable iron. This metal possesses the advantage 
of much greater tensile strength than soft iron. It is also 
more elastic, and does not readily take a permanent set, while 
it is much harder and is not worn or indented so easily as 
soft iron. At the same time it is not so brittle or hard to 
work as ordinary cast steel. These qualities render it 
eminently well adapted to purposes where lightness and 
strength are specially required, or where there is much wear, 
as in the case of railway cars, which, from their softness of 
texture, soon become destroyed. The cost of semi-steel will 
be a fraction less than iron, because the loss of metal that 
takes place by oxidation in the converting vessel is about two 
and a-half per cent, less than it is with iron ; but as it is a 
little more difficult to roll, its cost per ton may be fairly con- 
sidered to be the same as iron. But as its tensible strength 
is some thirty or forty per cent, greater than bar iron, it 
follows that for most purposes a much less weight of metal 
may be used ; so that, taken in that way, the semi-steel will 
form a much cheaper metal than any that we are at present 
acquainted with. The {'acts which I have brought before the 
meeting are not mere laboratory experiments, but the result 
of working on a scale nearly twice as great as is pursued in 
our largest ironworks — the experimental apparatus doing 
7 cwt. in thirty minutes, while the ordinary puddling furnace 
makes only 4<| cwt. in two hours, which is made into six 
separate balls, while the ingots or blooms are smooth, even 
prisms, ten inches square by thirty inches in length, weighing 
about equal to ten ordinary puddle balls. — The Athenceum. 
EXTRACTS FROM A LECTURE ON STRYCHNIA. 
By Stevenson Macadam, Ph.D., F.R.S.E. 
The lecturer having given the botannical history of the Koochlci tree, 
which grows abundantly in the southern districts of India, on the Malabar 
and Coromandel coasts, and furnishes the poison-nut, or seed, whence 
strychnia is obtained, with the manner of abstracting this alkaloid, pro- 
ceeds to observe that the tests for it are many, and some of them quite 
characteristic, as seen by the following table : 
THE STRYCHNINE TESTS. 
a. Potass , a white precipitate, insoluble in excess. 
b. Bicarbonate of Soda (in acid solution), no precipitate. 
