Ormerod, the consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society
of England, for the best collection of food-plants injured by insects,
accompanied by samples of the injurious creatures themselves, and a
short written account of the nature of their depredations and the
preventive measures to be adopted in dealing with them. There was only
one competitor, Mr Herbert Haley of Frome; but the collection which he
showed was a very complete one, and was most highly commended by Miss
Ormerod. As this was the first injurious-insect competition in this
country, and was probably known to comparatively few persons, we need
not be surprised at the want of competitors. Ten years ago in Paris, a
similar Exhibition took place, in which nearly four hundred competitors
took part. The exhibits included useful as well as injurious insects,
which were divided into separate classes. Such competitions ought to be
productive of a great amount of good.
Recent experiments have led to the adoption of many alterations in the
torpedo system, which is likely to play such an important part in naval
operations of the future. Hitherto, the torpedo—a huge fish-like case
to hold explosives, and containing within itself an air-engine for
propelling it through the water—was thrust from a ship’s side below
the water-line. But it was found in practice that it was impossible to
fire the agent of destruction in a straight line, especially if its
mother-ship were under way. In the new method, the torpedo, which is
sixteen feet long and fourteen inches in diameter, is fitted into a
steel tube just large enough to contain the projectile. The pressure
of a key admits highly compressed air to this tube, and the torpedo
is shot out of an open port on exactly the same principle that a pea
is projected from a pea-shooter. But in the case of the torpedo, its
little but powerful engine is set to work the moment it reaches the
water, and away speeds the torpedo on its terrible errand.
Professor Tuck of New York has constructed an electric torpedo boat,
which will render submarine warfare very terrible, if the hopes raised
by its recent trial are fulfilled. It is made of iron, in the shape of
a cigar, or rather pointed at each end, and is thirty feet in length.
It can travel on the surface of the water, or several feet below,
at the will of its commander. The torpedoes are carried outside the
vessel, and can be detached by the action of an electro-magnet, when it
is desired to let one rise to the surface against any ship that may be
lying overhead. By means of attached wires, the torpedo can be exploded
when the submarine boat has retired to a position of safety. Jules
Verne’s clever romance _Thirty Thousand Leagues under the Sea_, seems
here to come into play.
Under the supervision of Mr Preece, the well-known electrician to
the Post-office, an experiment of great interest has been recently
conducted at Wimbledon, near London. The object of the experiment was
to ascertain the best method of lighting streets by electricity, the
lamps employed being the incandescent pattern advocated by Edison,
Swan, and others. Some of the lamps were placed singly, others on poles
twenty feet high, while at the same time the efficiency of different
kinds of reflectors was tested. The cost is calculated to amount to
one farthing per lamp per hour for each unit of light, valued at
ten candles. Now, the cost of gas for a similar amount of light is
one-fifth of a penny, so that the difference in expense between the two
systems is not very great. On the other hand, the advantages of the
electric light in the open air, where no question of impure products
of combustion need come in, almost disappear; gas, therefore, still
fulfils the required conditions.
It is to be hoped that the new regulations for the prevention of
collisions at sea, which have just been published, will have the effect
of reducing those calamities, which have of late become fearfully
familiar. The twenty-seven articles contained in these regulations
refer to lights, sound-signals for fog, steering and sailing rules,
precautions to be adopted, and special rules for squadrons and
convoys. We may call particular attention to article nineteen, which
indicates how one vessel can signal to another by a steam-whistle.
Thus—one short blast to mean, ‘I am directing my course to starboard;’
two short blasts, ‘I am going to port;’ three to mean, ‘I am going
full speed astern.’ Any one will readily remark how such signals
could be added to almost indefinitely. Indeed, it is simply the
method adopted in the army for flash-signalling with the heliograph,
adapted to sound-signalling with the steam-whistle. In such a system,
unfortunately, there are few, in moments of danger, who can keep their
heads cool enough to avoid making perilous mistakes. It is somewhat
like talking quietly when the house is on fire.
About four years ago, the startling scheme of carrying ships upon a
specially constructed railway track bodily across that little neck of
land which ties together the two Americas was conceived by Mr Eades.
This scheme was communicated to the British Association at York in
1881, and although the idea seems a novel one, like most engineering
enterprises it can be doubtless accomplished if investors can be made
to believe in its power of paying a good dividend. The suggested
route would require a track one hundred and thirty-four miles in
length, which must be laid with a compound railway of extremely solid
construction. The worked-out details of the method of raising a ship
on a pontoon, transferring it to a travelling cradle, and finally
committing it to the deep once more, after its journey on dry land, are
most ingenious. Mr Eades, who hails from the United States, is now in
England, endeavouring to interest capitalists in his proposals.
The demolition of the old law-courts which adjoined Westminster Hall,
has brought into view one of the most interesting pieces of stonework
belonging to Norman times that can be found in London. The state of
preservation of the wall of the old hall, upon which the marks of the
mason’s tools are still visible, is due to the circumstance, that
from a very early time it was under cover, for a cloister extended
along the whole length of the building on this side. Mr Pearson, the
architect, was lately requested to report upon the subject, and to
suggest the best method of restoration compatible with the preservation
of this unique relic of the reign of William Rufus; and it has been
determined to restore the cloister as it originally stood. According to
the opinion of Mr Shaw-Lefevre, the First Commissioner of Works, the
edifice when completed will, with the Houses of Parliament and the old
abbey adjacent, form one of the grandest groups of buildings in Europe.
The attractions of South Kensington Museum have lately been added to by
the opening of a room containing a collection of antique casts, which
have been collected and arranged by Mr W. C. Perry. This collection
numbers about three hundred specimens, which illustrate the whole
historical range of ancient art. Such a record of the plastic art of
ancient times is of deep interest to the archæologist, as well as of
immense value to the art student. The arrangement of the specimens is
mainly chronological, and where one or two casts are, on account of
inconvenient size, not shown in their right place, it is in consequence
of want of space. We may venture to hope that at some not distant date,
better accommodation will be found for this valuable and interesting
collection.
The Great Western Railway has always been famed for the wonderful
engineering difficulties which were grappled with by the daring Brunel,
and many evidences of his skill are apparent to the traveller on that
line. But even Brunel did not conceive the bold idea of piercing a
tunnel twenty-six feet in diameter, and four and a half miles in
length, beneath the bed of the Severn. But this great work has now
been in progress for some years, and the operations latterly have
been pushed forward with such rapidity by three thousand busy men,
that its completion may soon be looked forward to. The tunnel will
shorten considerably the distance between London and South Wales. It
is constructed so as to dip considerably towards the centre, to which
point any water will naturally gravitate. Here it will enter a drainage
subway, which will carry it to the Welsh side, to be pumped up into the
river. The great difficulty which the workers have had to contend with
is the irruption of vast bodies of water from local springs. The crown
of the tunnel lies at a depth of from eighty to a hundred feet beneath
the bed of the river.
In these days of quick communication by telegraph and telephone, it
is strange to see how it becomes occasionally convenient to employ
‘the bird of the air’ to ‘carry the voice.’ In Haddingtonshire, at the
Penston Colliery, messages are carried from the pits to the offices, a
distance of more than six miles, by pigeons, and they accomplish the
work in about as many minutes. Telegrams are found to take about an
hour in executing the same business, and telephones are inadmissible,
because as yet no plan has been found by which the sounds can be
permanently recorded.
In a recent lecture on Cholera and its Prevention, Professor de
Chamont called attention to the very common and erroneous idea that
tobacco-smoke, camphor, and other strongly smelling compounds act as
disinfectants. He pointed out that although chlorine, sulphurous acid
gas, and carbolic acid may under certain conditions be safely regarded
as true disinfectants, the best and most efficient known is _fire_. He
also, in speaking of sulphurous acid gas, generated by burning sulphur,
showed that a ready way of facilitating combustion was first of all to
pour upon the brimstone a little alcohol.
Mr Graham, who recently gave an account of his mountaineering
experiences in the Himalaya, seems to have negatived some of our
preconceived notions regarding the difficulty of breathing at high
altitudes. At an elevation of more than four miles above the sea-level,
Mr Graham and his companions felt no inconvenience in breathing
except what might be expected from the muscular exertion they had
gone through. Loss of sight, nausea, bleeding at the nose or ears,
and other unpleasant symptoms often described by travellers, were
entirely absent. But the heart was sensibly affected, its rapid pace
being easily perceptible, and its beatings quite audible. It may
be remembered that Mr Glaisher and Mr Coxwell, in the course of an
experimental balloon ascent some years ago, nearly lost their lives
by the effect upon their breathing organs of the highly attenuated
atmosphere to which they had risen. But the altitude then reached was
about double that attained by Mr Graham in the Himalaya.
A scheme has been proposed for the construction of an Indo-European
railway, the chief novelty of which is the adoption of a route along
the south shore of the Mediterranean. The line would utilise the
railroads of France and Spain. Then there would be steam-transit from
Gibraltar Bay to Ceuta in Morocco. Here would be the terminus proper of
the international railway, which would be in connection with the lines
already laid in Algeria and Tunis. The route would be continued through
Tripoli to join the Egyptian lines, and eventually along the coast of
the Persian Gulf to Kurrachee in India. Here, of course, contact would
be made with the great Indian railway system. Preliminary surveys have
been already made, and the nominal capital of the undertaking is fixed
at ten millions sterling.
At the late meeting of the British Association in Canada, a very
curious contribution to our knowledge of carnivorous plants was made
by Professor Moseley, as a result of certain experiments he has made
with the water-weed _Utricularia vulgaris_. This plant is furnished
with small pear-shaped bladders, which at certain seasons are charged
with air, and cause the weed to rise to the surface of the water. This
movement has hitherto been supposed to be connected with the phenomenon
of fertilisation. But Professor Moseley points out that each bladder
has an opening closed by an elastic door, which will easily yield to
the pressure of a small fish; and that any unfortunate intruder is
either caught bodily, or can be securely held a prisoner by head or
tail until dead. That there is here anything analogous to digestion as
seen in other carnivorous plants, such as the _Dionæa_, &c., does not
appear; but it is thought probable that the decomposing animal matter
may contribute eventually to the life of the weed.
An invention of considerable importance in connection with the
probability of saving life at sea has made its appearance during the
month. This consists of an adaptation of the use of oil at sea to the
ordinary life-buoy. Round the inside of the buoy is a brass reservoir
filled with oil. This is so arranged that when the buoy is hung upon
the vessel’s side no oil can escape; while the moment it assumes a
horizontal position, as, for instance, when it is thrown into the sea,
the oil flows freely, and the water all around the buoy is rapidly
covered with a thin film. This soon widens into a large circle, within
which, of course, the waves are unbroken, which enables persons to be
the more easily secured by the ship’s boats. Since it is a well-known
fact that in rough weather, when the cry ‘Man overboard!’ is oftenest
heard, life-buoys are frequently useless, as even the strongest men are
commonly washed off them, this practical adaptation of the use of oil
at sea will probably prove of signal importance. It could, we imagine,
also be readily applied to many of those improvised sea-rafts and
similar appliances, and render them of great value in rough weather.
It was the fault of many of those ingenious contrivances of this kind
which were to be seen at the Fisheries Exhibition last year, that no
one could possibly live on them in broken water, and this objection
the use of oil in this way would certainly obviate. It should be
noticed, however, that the chief value of the invention consists in the
arrangement for the oil to flow automatically.
In addition to the electrically lighted colliery in South Wales,
noticed in last ‘Month,’ we hear of another in Lanarkshire belonging
to Mr John Watson, Earnock, near Hamilton. There may possibly be other
workings thus illuminated throughout this country; and there is no
doubt that ere long the brilliant and comparatively safe electric light
will be generally adopted underground.
In Prussia also, as we learn from a contemporary, the electric light
at the Mechernich Mines has now had a fair trial for more than three
years, and has proved a complete success. The expectation that it would
both facilitate the operations and increase their security, has fully
been realised, and an extension of the plant is now being carried out.
An open working two thousand feet long, one thousand feet wide, and
over three hundred feet deep, in which three hundred men and twenty
horses are continually occupied, was first to be supplied with the
electric light, and it was a question whether arc lamps would answer
for this purpose in the smoky atmosphere caused by blasting operations.
For the first experiments, arc lamps of three thousand and one thousand
candles were used, with the positive carbon in the lower holder. The
effect was brilliant, yet the light did not penetrate the white smoke
cloud which collects at the upper wall immediately after the shot. But
as the smoke settles within ten minutes, it was thought advisable to
acquiesce in this interruption of a few minutes, and to use smaller
lamps of three hundred and fifty candles, which proved quite efficient.
Of these, there are ten in use, with about ten thousand feet of lead
cable, the cable being partially elastic, as the lamps with their
wires have to be removed when the blasting is to take place. The lamps
were originally supplied with hexagonal lanterns with obscured glass
to protect the eyes of the miners. The glasses were, of course, soon
broken, but no complaints are said to have been made about the naked
electric lights.
The speech-recorder would appear to be an instrument of no small
importance, if it is able to do in a practical manner that which the
title of a patent recently applied for by Mr W. E. Irish would lead
us to suppose. The title of the patent is as follows: ‘A system or
method and means of receiving and recording articulated speech and
other sounds transmitted telegraphically, telephonically, or otherwise,
by the aid of electricity.’ The transmitting, as by telephone, and
recording of speech in characters which may be easily read, would be
of incalculable value. If this instrument fulfils what is claimed
for it, the anticipations once hoped for in the phonograph will be
realised, and in the future we may expect to see business-men talking
their correspondence into a box in which mechanism, by the aid of
electricity, records the same on paper, which may be forwarded as a
letter. Moreover, literary men will be saved the drudgery of the pen,
and have their thoughts recorded as rapidly as they can convey them
to the instrument. The system of natural phonetic signs, which we
should expect this instrument to describe, may also be the means of
influencing spelling and of simplifying the phonographic difficulties
of the language. Applications innumerable suggest themselves to us to
which such an apparatus may be applied; the verifying and duplicating
of orders received and sent telephonically, would form no small item in
the advantages to be derived from such a system.
According to the _Journal de Rouen_, quoting from the _Polytechnische
Zeitung_, the recent invention of M. Verk, by which is produced the
effect of any metal on felt, is likely to become extremely useful when
applied to theatrical stage properties, as, besides being inexpensive,
the articles so treated are not materially increased in weight. The
things intended to assume a metallic appearance are first of all
covered with a layer of felt, which is coated over with a resinous
substance mixed with plumbago or blacklead. This is left to dry,
and is then passed over with a hot iron. The article is next rubbed
with pumice-stone, which produces the effect of burnished steel. If
copper, bronze, or silver is wished to be imitated, the felt—which is
rendered a conductor by its coating—is covered readily by immersion in
a galvano-plastic bath.
OCCASIONAL NOTES.
TELEGRAPHING EXTRAORDINARY.
A contemporary supplies some interesting particulars as to the number
of words transmitted by telegraph to all parts of the kingdom on the
occasion of the Prime Minister’s recent visit to Edinburgh. On the
evening of Mr Gladstone’s arrival, press messages containing over
seventeen thousand words were handed in at the telegraph department of
the General Post-office; but the actual number of words transmitted
was over sixty-seven thousand, owing to the fact of the same report
being sent to more than one newspaper. Mr Gladstone’s visit to the
Forth Bridge works led to the transmission of twelve thousand words,
and his movements on the following day to nineteen thousand. On the
occasion of his first speech on Saturday evening (August 30) in the
Corn Exchange, sixty-two thousand four hundred and seventy-one words
were handed in, and one hundred and thirty-eight thousand four hundred
and forty-five transmitted. The number would have been greater had not
Sunday intervened, allowing of the transmission of many messages by
train. On Monday evening (September 1) the press messages reached the
enormous number of one hundred and seventeen thousand words, causing
the transmission of about four hundred and twenty-seven thousand words,
the largest number ever transmitted on any one night from Edinburgh.
After the Waverley Market speech of Tuesday night (September 2), one
hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred and twenty-one words
were transmitted.
On Monday evening, when the strain was heaviest, one hundred and
thirty operators were at work, and in spite of the constant stream of
messages the department kept abreast of the reporters. As many as four
towns in the same telegraphic circuit were enabled to read almost the
same message at the same time. The message having been ‘punched’ on
long slips of prepared paper, the plan was adopted, instead of running
it entirely through one machine, of taking the slip out of the first
machine after it was three yards clear, and running it into a second
and a third.
CASUALTIES ON THE BRITISH COAST.
A blue-book on sea-casualties to British vessels from July 1, 1882 to
June 30, 1883, contains the Report of the Marine Department of the
Board of Trade, showing that the total number of vessels belonging
to the United Kingdom to which casualties occurred (total losses and
serious and minor casualties) was 5409. This is higher by one hundred
and eleven than in 1881-82, when it was 5298, and higher than any year
since 1876-77, when it was 5801. The number of total losses was eight
hundred and ten (tonnage 277,490). This is lower than the previous
two years, but higher than in either of the four years preceding.
The decrease in the last two years is in sailing-vessels (classed
and unclassed) and in unclassed steamships. There is, however, a
large increase (twenty-five per cent.) in the total losses of classed
steamships. The number of serious casualties not amounting to total
losses was 1268, and was lower than any of the previous six years,
except 1879-80, when it was slightly higher. The decrease is entirely
confined to sailing-vessels. The number of steamships (five hundred
and seventy-one) to which serious casualties occurred is larger than
in any of the previous six years, and the tonnage of the vessels
affected is nearly one hundred and fifty thousand more than in 1876-77.
From 1877-78 there is a steady annual rise in serious casualties
to steamships from four hundred and six in 1877-78 to five hundred
and seventy-one in 1882-83. In 1876-77 they were four hundred and
ninety-three. The loss of life in vessels belonging to the United
Kingdom was 2501 in 1882-83, or seven hundred and seventy-six less
than in 1881-82, but was more than the loss in each of the five years
preceding 1881-82, and was three hundred and thirty-one more than
the average for the six years. Of these 2501 lives, 1463 were lost
in missing vessels. The number of missing ships was one hundred and
fifty-two, namely: Sailing-ships, 133; tonnage, 32,995; lives lost,
1080: steamships, 19; tonnage, 14,626; lives lost, 383—total lives
lost, 1463.
‘YES.’
A little rain,
The sun again,
A shadow;
A summer day,
Some new-mown hay,
A meadow.
A girlish face,
A matchless grace,
And beauty;
We spend the day
In making hay—
Sweet duty.
Some fading flowers,
Some happy hours,
But fleeting.
A week of rain,
And then again
A meeting.
One quick shy look,
A rippling brook,
Some clover;
A sky of gold,
The story old,
A lover.
A fair sweet maid,
A short word said;
What is it?
I try my fate,
And not too late
To miss it.
The years have gone,
And still loves on
That lover;
He loves always,
As days and days
Pass over.
A loving wife,
A long, long life
Together,
Have made him bless
That shy sweet ‘Yes’
For ever.
NORA C. USHER.
* * * * *
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