1876.] 
Notices of Booh. 
537 
Agonistes,” to guard one gate of a city and leave another open 
to the enemy ? What is the use of severe “ Pharmacy ACts ” as 
long as explosives and fire-arms may be purchased and kept by 
all sorts and conditions of men ? It is all very well for a daily 
paper to indulge in the statement that “ an ounce of cyanide of 
potassium is capable of doing more harm than a ton of nitro- 
glycerine.” Even were this true, the writer overlooks the main 
point — that explosives can be used to produce such sweeping 
havoc as the Bremerhaven and the Clerkenwell outrages, whilst 
even the deadliest poison, in the hands of the most remorseless 
villain, can prove fatal only to those few persons to whose food 
he has access ; a faCt which terribly narrows the circle within 
which the guilty person must be sought. We must therefore 
denounce, as utterly uncalled for, the proposal to increase the 
stringency and the scope of the ACts regulating the sale of 
poisons. It is a great misfortune that when political and literary 
organs find themselves compelled to deal with some scientific 
topic, they do not see the propriety of putting the matter into the 
hands of some specially qualified writer. 
Annual Record of Science and Industry for 1875. Edited by 
Spencer F. Baird. London : Trubner and Co. 
We have here a condensed summary of the most important 
inventions, discoveries, and observations made during the year 
1875- 
Among the paragraphs thus collected we are first struck, 
though most unfavourably, with a “ new mode of embalming,” 
said to have been discovered by one Madame jalourear. The 
corpse is to be placed in an impermeable coffin, together with 
certain substances which produce a rapid, though not putrid, 
decomposition, whilst the products cannot escape from the 
enclosure. The substance in question is phosphate of lime, 
which is said to have the property of causing rapid decompo- 
sition without offensive odour. To begin with, we doubt this 
very much. We have always found soluble phosphates— and no 
less insoluble ones, if in a gelatinous state— powerful promoters 
of putrefaction in its most offensive form, whence the necessity, 
in the treatment of sewage, of withdrawing all phosphates from 
solution. It is further a grievous fault that all the nitrogen, 
phosphates, and other principles found in the bodies of the dead 
should be withdrawn from natural circulation, and that an addi- 
tional quantity of phosphate of lime should be wasted in the 
attempt to modify the character of decomposition. The scheme 
holds, in our opinion, a doubtful position between folly and 
crime. 
