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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXVI, Issue 72, 29 March 1892, Page 2

A speoial notice^'eays the Daily Nem) has been issued by tho Board of Trade calling the attention of shipowners, captains, aud - others, to the provisions of the Act whioh reqnire every package of certain poisons transmitted by sea to bo paoked and stowed with certain precautions. Tha notice is avowedly occasioned by a recant rather alarming inoident. A cask of arsenic shipped to New Zealand bad become BO damaged on board ship that the arsenlo escaped, and what is worse, became mixed with paokage3 containing a variety o£ other atttoles of food, What has become of those packages -whether the acoideufc was discovered in time to analyse or destroy the muoh contaminated goods, or whether these artioles of poisoned food have gone to spread destruction among the unfortunate New Zealanders does not appear; bat oar Government at least have aofced promptly in the matter. The first step taken by the Privy Council was to consult the Council of tho Pharmaceutical Society, aud it is under the advico of that body that the notioo referred to has been issued and widely circulated, —Telegrams received in Berlin from LodV in Rußsian Poland, state that ever 5Q person* ia tho village on the frontier aro ill with trichinosis. Up to the present 17 have died. In New Silesia an entire family consisting of 11 persons has succumbed to the disease. Pliny, the Roman hietoriao, aaya in om^ passage that " among the Northern Indiana " (Hindus) " there are certain anta that extraai gold from the mines; and this gold, wbiqh they extract in winter, the Indians rob them of ia summer." The carious fact oomaa eat that while there is no such species ot ante ia ladia there is one to whioh the description fairly applies in North America. The Pogotu , omyrmex Occidental covers the dome of Kg hillook with a mosaic of fragments of rooks, fessils, ores, eto,, whioh it oontains .by a regular mining operation beneath the surface of the earch- As the soil there is often auriferous, among the fragments stack over tho antihill there occur frequent spangles of gold, whioh are picked o^f and oolleo^4 by the natives. Either' when fliny wrote there was a species of "ant ia India which has now become exfcinofc, or North America was known to fcho 'ancients, and the anc merely located wrongly by the historian. Naturalists think the former very improbable, Whither we are drifting.— Astronomers, after haviug made the son a fixture, found out that he was moving after all -not round the earth as waa anciently supposed, but through space on an independent oouraeof hisotvn, aud parrying, of course, all hia planetary train along with him. Tha oourae is either in a straight line towards some uukaown, infinitely distant gaol, or in a curve with so vast a radius that the segment of it traversed in a- *oousand 3 ears cannot be diatinguißhedfrom a straight line. An interesting point whioh astronomers have endeavoured to fix is the direotion in whioh the sun is travelling, from certain motions, real and apparent, of some of the fixed qtafe, it was inferred that we were moving steadily towards that part of the heavens oooopied'at present by the constellation Hercules. Some recent careful and laborioas observations at Bonn and Albany tend, however, to change this direotion somewhat, but not so much as to destroy all reliance on former calculations. The result has been to shift the.probible point to whioh we are being carried from Hercules to the immediately neighbor- . ing oonstellation, I^yra, - " Tbe Vienna correspondent of ihe.StotfcforiJ telegraphed onehe'lst February :— " For s week pass an epidomio described aa "intestinal oatarrh has prevailed in Vienna, and there is soaraely a house ia the city without one or more patients. In spite of thia the sanjtsty authorities for some time declined to take cognizance of the malady. The Burgomaster 0! Vienna, indeed, employed the Austrian Press Law to compel one of the Vienna papera to contradict the report of the existence of suoh an epjdemio, whioh had been attributed to the impurity qf tbe Vienna drinking water. This eoorga the authorities have now found il neaawary to abandon. The fact that there are between £0,000 and £0,000 euoh eases as (ha present time ia Vienua, maay of thetrt at the hospitals, whero the doctors call tha malady intestinal influents, cannot be denied. The bacteriological examination showed thai' fn bodies of persons who died of tha haw disease there was not only the influeuaa baoillas as discovered in Berlin, but a new sort of baauV lus hitherto unknown. The doctors now forbid the una of Vienna drinking water, whioh was formerly the purest in Europe, and where that advioa is followed the illness disappears ia a couple of days, leaving the patient only in a state of extreme waakuois resembling that after influenza. " Mr 0. 1). Kelway is now showing at the fioyal Naval exhibition aa invention which promises tc be q! great praotioal value. It consists of an apparatus /or marine and general eleotijo signalling, a number ot eleotrio inoandeaoent lamps are nlaoed ja a Notable frame, from whioh insulated wires aro led So a key-boaid, similar to those used ia typewriters or compound-awUeh. A key ia appropriated for eaoh letter of the alphabet and for numerals. On this key being depressed the eleotrio ourrreot is switched on to tbe* lamps representing the corresponding letter, whioh is at ones shown to the observer, On the pressure being removed the lights disap* . pear, and the next letter or nameral, i§ in like mannor shown, the words being spelt out at a rate more quickly than by the Morse system. Mr Kelway claims chat the applied . ■ tioos to which thia invention can be no) are; numerous. It might, he thinks, bo of gw«t, service ia naval tactics, aud prove invaluable for military purposes, He also painfce out that it would enable mercrmtile vessels to communicate readily with each other aud with the shore. ;j It is not generally known that the light i ol the sun and the moon exercises a deleter* ■ ous effect on edge tools. Knives, drills, scythes, and sickles assume a blue colour if they are exposed for some time to the lijrht : and heat of the sun ; the sharp edge disappears, and the tool is rendered absolutely useless until it la re>tempesed. Purchasers should therefore be on their gnard against buying tools from retail dealers and pedlars whioh, for show pnrposes, • have probably ' been exposed for days together to the "gb^ of the sun. The unaervioeableness of tools acquired under these conditions la generally wrongly attributed to bad material, or to inferior workmanship. A airhularly pre* < judicial effect has been excereised by moon* ,■ light. An ordinary cross cut saw is asserted :r to have been put out ot shape in a single uighfc by exposure to the light of the mooa, .-# ~l roi '- ■ ' ' . . ' . ' -I In demonstrating that sulphur melted at -^i about U5 deg. can be copied ia paper,' M « Oharles Lepierra happened to use a lifcho- '••" i; : '^H graphed card, the edges of whioh were :, 'sM turned up. Upon taking away the card he -HP discovered that the lithographed oharabters wero olearly impressed oponthe cooled ear* ;^f face of the sulphur, and remaxned after hard friotion and washing; By repeated oxnaii; '^Wl mints he has been able ' to seqpro verr&V^flf reauUsr, reinpying : tha" paper 'eachHirqe HrMli sirhptfwaabiDgMdxtAb^ th^t stfphar will rcceiva H«hpre«sious frotfllt Signs in ordinary gsantoto, oraybiil. roolonral^i orajyons, \ wtitafe ink, .iymgtftihfeai fatfllli it will reproduoa gecafspbjoir rn^l