SCIENTIFIC.

Evening Star, Issue 6762, 29 November 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

SCIENTIFIC.

Tho Bill requiring all telegraph,.telephone, and electric light wires in New York State to be put underground has been, signed by Governor Cleveland, The Bill only applies •to cities having 500,000 inhabitants or over. .The wires are all to be buried,by November 1, 1885, or they will be removed by the local authorities.

As showing the advantages of the telephone in cases of fire,' it may be mentioned that the news of the recent outbreak at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, was received by its means at the Central Station, within a few minutes of the first alarm.

Doctors Klein, Gibbs, and Lingard, who were sent to India by the Secretary of State for India to investigate the subject of cholera, are busily prosecuting the work in Bombay. It is stated that so little faith does Dr Klein possess in Dr Koch's germ theory, that he tested the question personally by swallowing a quantity of bacilli without any evil result. The 'Lancet' considers "the true athlete of the time id Mr Gladstone. The nation has seen nothing like him since the days of Palmerston, whose octogenarian youthfulnesa excited its admiration. We are speaking apart from all political questions and issues; we are speaking from a physiological standpoint; and we pronounce the physical and mental power displayed by Mr Gladstone in Scotland, after five years of scarcely paralleled labor, to be a piece of veritable athleticism worthy the study of young men, and a fit subject of pride to the nation." A victory (has ' Nature' says) been gained by Van Kysselberghe in Belgium by the solution of the problem of transmitting a telegraphic and a telephonic message along the same wire at the same time. A trial of th's has been made at the Antwerp Universal Exhibition, where-concerts held in the important towns in Belgium wero heard; the transmission being made with Ordinary instruments along ordinary telegraph lines and with earth returns. There was recently completed in a railway engine shop at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, a locomotive, which, it is anticipated, will bo able to pull a train on the New York division of the Lehigh road at the rate of eighty miles an hour. This engine weighs nearly 100,0001b, and the tender, when filled with coal and water, 70,0001b. The engine will develop from 1,400 to 1,500 horse-power.