Miscellaneous.

Clutha Leader, Volume XX, Issue 1036, 8 June 1894, Page 7

Miscellaneous.

A French physician, who says 1 thai the majority of deaths upon the battlefield arise from the bleeding to death j of the wounded while, waiting for the surgeon, proposes that each soldier in he French army shall be taught where the arteries of the body are and how to xrert hemorrhages from them. In loing this he has found a use, for that most useless of arts — tattooing — a small figure of some kind being tattooed over each artery, so that the soldier nan at one« see where to rhe. ligature. A great change will have to come over the spirit of English industry if competition with some of the newer developments abroad is to be thought of. Switzerland, which once appeared to be debarred by lack of coal from taking rank as an engineering country, has within the last few years made enormous strides in the direction of utilising its natural sorces of power, and a flourishing industrial city will shortly grow up around Niagara, under more favourable conditions than have ever before heen known. One largp paper factory at Niagara has contracted for 6000 horse-power to be used direct, at the unprecedented price of Bdols per annum. Scottish papers announce the death of David Grant, the last survivor of the ill-fated steamer Forfarshire, memorable for the heroism of Grace Darling. At the age of fifteen he went to sea, and : had just finished his apprenticeship of five years when his ship ran ashore in the Gulf of Finland and was wrecked. Then for some years he was engaged in j coasting vessels, and in 1837 signed as seaman on board the Forfarshire, and was one of those rescued when that vessel was wrecked on the Fame Islands. This second disaster cured him of his love of seafaring, and he has been tending cows in the neighbourhood of Dundee. Last year an edict was issued by the Russian Government, ordering all money transmitted in letters • or postal packets to be confiscated at the Post Office. Three-fourths of the money •thus impounded was ordered to be paid into the Imperial Treasury, the remainder going as a reward for vigilance to the Post Office employe who succeeded in ' scenting ' the. money, consisting visually, o£ cours", of bank-not«s. Successive representations addressed to the Government have been unavailing to get this strange restriction removed. At length, however, a modification of the original order has been made. \n future, one-fourth of money so transmitted contrary to the rule is to go as before to the official discovering it, but the remaining three-fourths, instead of enriching the Government, is to be graciously handed over to its rightful owner, the person to whom it is addressed. At a recent meeting of the Wellington Benevolent Trustees the secretary stated that a great many of the men who received relief were sailors and stewards who left their ships, and nearly all were young able-bodied fellows. Work would shortly be provided for 50 men, which would show whether they were honajlde or not. A deputation of five waited on the Trustees and asked to havf their passages paid to Sydney. The Board flatly refused to do anything of the kind. Th"c acting chairman said men had been brought into the country in the emigration days at great cost and he would never be a party to sending its bone and sinew away. The bush-felling season was coming on and men would be able to get work if they went into the country. The deputation, which was headed by an agitator named Ward who had been making himself disagreeably conspicuous lately, were not satis fied and came back again to complain that the food supplied was not fit to eat, and to ask if they might earn enough to pay their passages by ston^breaking. The Trustees replied that they had no money to pay for stonebreaking, and the deputation left, Ward threatening to begin a newspaper agitation for the purpose of showing the Trustees up. The Melbourne Argus says that the discovery has been made that the New Zealand woollen mills are paying good di-vidends, and are altogether in a healthier condition than the woollen mills of Victoria. • They are also obtaining orders from England for their specialties. They earn from Bto 12 per cent profit. They employ also far more hands in proportion to population than are employed in Victoria. Yet the New Zealand Customs duty is only 20 per cent., as against 50 per cent, in Victoria. These facts are now related as news in the High Tariff press, and it is explained that the Victorian mills languish'because they contain obsolete machinery. According to this account, the duties have been raised from 20 to 50 per cent, in Victoria in the interests of obsolete machinery, and prices have been sent up, and people have been pinched in clothing accordingly, in addition to which, as the clothing manufacturers have asserted, hundreds of hands have been deprived of employment. The acknowledgment that woollen mills can flourish under 20 per cent, duties is an argument for 'the producers who are calling for a reduction of Customs taxation to that standard, Why pay wore 1

At birth a negro cliild is of a reddish nut-brown colour, which turns to a slatish-grey in the. first week of the child's existence. The black colour is not fully developed for a peYiod varying from one to throe years, according to the nature of the locality and the influence of Iho climate. Darwin says that the children of Australians, immediately after bitth are yellowish brown and become dark at a later a<ct\ Those of the Guaranysof Paraguay are whitish yellow, but they acquire in the course of a few weeks the yellowish brown tint of their parents. It is curious to notice that thu eyes of a negro child are bluo at birth, and his hair of a dark chestnut colour is only curled at the ends. The other day an atrocious young villian named Sabourin, only nineteen years of age, was guillotined at Niort for having murdered and mutilated his own sister, whom he robbed. T,he aflair attracted an unusual amount of attention, partly on account of the dreadful character of the crime, and partly because no execution has previously taken place in Niort for the sixty years. A local surgeon, M. Pretay, obtained permission to dissect the body of the criminal after the execution, and he has now made public the result of his experiments. His report is couched in highly technical language, but the effect of it is to favour the theory of Dr Lombroso, that criminals are insane, their brains being structurally different from those of lawabiding people. Dr Pretay is convinced that Sabourin was not responsible for his actions.