WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 256, 13 July 1926, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

A method of turning grass into doth without the assistance of sheep has. been discovered. —Cutting ou the middleman again?

Another battle is in progress in China. —lf they are not careful someone will be hurt in one of these engagements.

The Soviet is colonising Wrangel Island, in the Arctic, with Eskimos in order to establish Russian sovereignty. —There doesn’t appear to be any Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Eskimos.

Disastrous as it has been, the explosion at the United States naval ammunition depot at Long Island appears to fail far short of being America’s biggest catastrophe of this kind during recent years. A much more severe explosion was that at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 8, 1917, when the ammunition ship Mont Blanc blew up with 2800 tons of explosives on board. The Mont Blanc, bound from New York to Europe, collided with the Belgian relief ship Imo in the Narrows of Halifax Harbour. About twenty minutes alter the collision the Mont Blanc’s cargo exploded, and in a flash 1260 persons children in school, invalids in hospital, families in their homes—were killed, about 6000 others were injured, and some 25,000 rendered homeless.

Altogether an area of two and a half acres in Halifax was laid waste as completely as if a barrage of artillery fire had swept it. The forte of the explosion also created a sori of tidal wave, that lashed the land and swept far out to sea. XV itli hall the city in ruins, and the doors and windows of nearlv all the. houses in the other half blown out, Halifax was next day swept by a blinding snowstorm and a • fierce midwinter gale, that blocked the arrival of relief trains. The explosion was causid by benzol from iron drums on the. ship’s deck pouring down on to picric acid below. This started a fire, and. :n the next compartment of the ship was T.N.T. The captain, realising what must happen, rushed his crew, into the boats and got them ashore into the woods before the vessel

One of the biggest explosiots during the war was at a munition factory at Woolwich, in England, aid the greatest in Europe since the reurn of peace was that at the Baden aniline works at Oppau, in September 1921. At these works great quantities of poison gas were manufactured dutng the war, and later on the plant was changed over to the production of .rtificial manures by the extraction of litrogen from the atmosphere. The explosion originated in a reservoir contaiiing two hundred tons of ammonium alphate. Nearlv a thousand persons wee killed, and next day 2500 more wer in the hospitals in the surrounding towns. The town of Oppau had a population of onlv 6500, and most of it breadwinner's were employed in tin works. * * *

The - noise’ of the Halifax explosion was heard sixty miles away, md the concussion tfrorn that at Opau was felt at Munich 175 miles distat. Two big explosions have been mad of set purpose during recent years toliscovcr as much as possible about te path taken bv sound waves. When te Woolwich disaster occurred in Eiiland it .W,a& noted that Jin numbers ,'f cases the sound was distinctly heard V everybody in distant towns., while itervening towns half the distance a r ay did not hear anything. . Apparcn y the sound travels a limited distane horizontally, but certain waves stike up through the. highest latmosphre and then reach the surface of the uth at distant spots.

At Aldebroeck, in Holland, i Octo bcr 1922, five tons of ammomm perchlorate was exploded for expemental purposes, and while the soun< was heard generally over an area exlnding about 12| miles to the north-eat and 44 miles to the south, m certaimlaccs the explosion was audible at point ranging up to 560 miles from the spotvhere it occurred. At Le Courtme, in Fance, in 1924, ten tons of melinite ws e. - plodedi, but the records of ambihty were disappointing relatively t the force of the explosion, which blw out a crater six hundred feet wic and twenty 1 feet -deep. t # Earth’s biggest noise ever in Istoricni times so far as is known was the Krakatoa eruption of 1883. I’here were, four very loud ex P l ° s ’ on L, l b f course of the eruption, the thii ot which was the loudest. Krakaaa is in the Straits of Sunda bctweei Java and Sumatra, and so tremendou was the noise of the loudest explosio that it woke from their sleep the habitants of Daly Waters in South Astra lia, 2000 miles away. At a dltance of 3000 miles the sound of the xplo sions resembled the tor o heavy guns. The clouds of dus ,^. on ’ Krakatoa entered the region o‘high winds and were swept along at aspeed of 76 miles an hour. In three day the crossed the Indian Ocean and then passed over Equatorial Africa, lhev continued over the Atlantic, Braz, and the Pacific, returning to Krakaoa in thirteen days. A certain amont of the dust had settled by tins tim, but the great bulk of it set off agin on another journev round the eart and kept up its globe-trotting tor some months The meteorologists baymet“s all over the earth recorded te air waves from the eruption, which crcled the globe in 37 hours. This is recorded instance of an ait wae SO -•eat that the atmosphere of th entire earth takes part in it.

Here is a livelv sort of shoolteacher gathering that an Educaonal Institute''has not, so far, inanguated. Tlie announcement is from an Irhana newspaper: Married school men, their n.es and sweethearts will hold thcirinnual picnic at McNaughton Tck, Elkhart, on Saturday, June 0. It does no good to argue with rour wife that two-thirds of the P eo C’ drive cars <;an’t afford them. V got cars, and that’s all your wr i interested in.

The Judge: “So you claim you -obbed that pork butcher’s because yon were starving? Why didn’t you ake something to eat, instead of s£? n S all the cash out of the register? The Accused: “’Cause Im a psud man, Judge, an’ I make it a rule to pay for everything I eat. REDBIRDS. Redbirds, redbirds, Long and long ago, What a honey-call you had In hills I used to know. Redbud, buckberry, Wild plum-tree And proud river sweeping Southward to the seaBrown and gold in the sun Sparkling far below, Trailing stately round her bluffs Where the poplars grow. Redbirds, redbirds, Are you singing still As you sang one May day On Saxton’s Hill? Sara Teasdale, ia “Flame and