NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11826, 2 December 1901, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

A very interesting article on the utilisation of waste products appears in the Forum for September, from the pen of Professor Peter T. Austen. It is much too long to summarise, but it contains a great number of facts which are full of encouragement- to those who are busied with the attempt to utilise the waste products of modem industry. 110 mentions, for instance, that the city of Antwerp once paid 5000dols a year to get rid of its refuse. Later on it received 200.000do!s a year from the same refuse; scientific men having found ways to utilise it. Another illustration of the same kind of thing is the statement which he makes concerning the-utilisation of soapsuds : —As an instance of how this can be worked up, the yarn mills at Mulliausen may be cited. The soap-suds are precipitated with lime, and the coagulum is collected, pressed into bricks, dried, and heated in gas retorts. A gas is obtained which has three times the illuminating power of coalgas. Nearly twice as much gas can be produced as is required to light the factory. The waste of a great city is full of fortunes that await the winning. For instance, he says the amount of fine coal which at present is lost in the ashes of New York is estimated at from 600 to 1000 tons a day. Even vermin may be utilised. Rats offer a great opportunity to someone who has the knowledge and business ability to raise them. They breed easily and rapidly, and will live on garbage and offal. Their skins make a leather tougher than kid, and grace the hand of many a woman who would scream at the thought of a rat about her. Their fur is used by hatters, and is said to be more delicate than the beaver's. The number of things that can be made out of bones is almost inconceivable, but few are aware that " some years ago there was quite a rim on dress buttons made out of blood." Skim-milk is being utilised in a number of unsuspected ways. He says the result of experiments has been the development of a large industry in manufacturing from the products of skim-milk coatings and sizings for paper, waterproof glues for wood veneers and other purposes, paints, substitutes for hen's eggs, hard rubber, horii, etc. Professor Austin says a great many other interesting things, and finally meditates concerning the transformation which is constantly going on in all material things. He says matter is continually passing through its endless cycle. An overcoat may have in. it the remains of ball-dresses and prison shirts. It may have lain on luxurious beds or in the gutters. When our shoes wear out they are made into fertilisers, and produce grass and grain, and from the grass and grain are raised cows, and out of the cow's skin we make leather again. So we have the shoe back again, less that portion of it that has been consumed as milk and beef. Nothing is really lost in Nature. Give the ground filth it returns us the flower. Matter is in eternal circulation. " Give me the sewage of New York City," says Dr. Long, "and I will return you yearly the superior milk of 100,000 cows."

In an article in Cassier's Magazine, upon the Comstock of to-day, Mr. T. A. Rickard gives a lively description of what Virginia City was like during the height of the boom: —When the bonanza began to be productive, in 1874, it made the Consolidated Yirgina a marvel among mines. The average yield for three years was £600,000 per month. The dividends were at the rate jof £216,000 per month. You can visit the I assay office at Virgin a City, and Mr. Field- ! ing, who still has charge of it, will tell you that there was melted in that office £25,000 worth of bullion per day for three years, and that one night there was taken out of the strongroom, for shipment to San Francisco, bullion valued at £1,000,000. These figures make the ordinary digging I for gold seem tame enough." It is not Surprising that under such conditions human nature should have asserted itself, and that the prolific production of the mines should have led to a reckless extravagance of ideas and of expenditure. The money paid in commissions to superintendents, the steals perpetrated by the reduction works, the tricks played with the stock market, were all mean and despicable, as such performances in their nature must be; but they were perpetrated on the Comstock with such a magnificence of proportion and with such grand-ducal impudence that their true character was obscured by a. glamour incomprehensible to those who hrfve kept out of the atmosphere of insensate speculation. Says Mr. Rickard of the Comstock as it now is: —The racehorse who, in his old age, pulls the dustcart has a nobler ending than a great mining camp in its decadence ruled bv the enemy of honest labour. On the Carson River I saw the old mills which are now silenced, and the dredges which once worked the tailings from the mills. * The valley of the Carson has seen many vicissitudes. Placer mining for gold made it important before the Comstock; then it became cultivated by the industrious folk who supplied the mines with vegetables; j later still the mills became centred along the waterway; and finally the Sutro tunnel gave it a short-lived prosperity. The unlovely quiet of abandonment which now rests on the whole district has also failen on the Carson valley. The Chinaman alone is superior to his surroundings. Amid a general decay he continues to give lif°. to the green spots which his patient hands have won from the sterile surface. The heathen Chinee and his kitchen-garden form a picture which is the very antithesis of the volcanic energy which once made the Comstock famous throughout the world.

The modern horse racing of England began, like Grecian chariot racing, in bare utility. It sprang from the business-like testing and comparing of the animals offered for sale at fairs and markets. At Sinithfield, as early as the twelfth century, t-sere was a regular racing of horses for this entirely practical and therefore eminently British purpose. &ot till the reign of the first Stuart, however, did racecourses

proper comento being at Epsom and New. market, wit! the consequent establishment of training sibles and professional jockey, ism. l)oncas'«r and Ascot date only frcm two centuries ago. Racing, as we now have it, is the?fore a spontaneous development of Hritav and has borrowed nothing j from antiquity, Nevertheless (says tin ! Melbourne -Arc ■) the similarity between a meeting at Ellington and a meeting in the Roman Cir\is is astonishingly clory. It is true that *e Roman interest centred on the race of cluiots rather than on that of the ridden lio?e. .It- is true also thifc the Roman racecorse was surrounded by o r.« j vast; stand resplqdent with marble, gilt, and bronze. Rut for the rest, the starter's Hag, the judge's l>x, the distribution of the race cards, the beting (though without the professional ring).the red. white, blue, and green colours of te jockey-dunioteers, the huge presents giv«i to them, the bribes to secure cross-drivinj the liocussinjr of horse; in the stables—allthis went on as merrilv under Marcus Amlius of Rome as under Edward VII. of Inland. The social position of the jockeywas identical with that of to-day. lie rewired the same dexterity and coolness ; he vis open to the same corruptions : he was rewarded with the same liberality by the unie description of racegoers. It is by n means "happy Britain"' which has been th first, as Sonierville supposed, " to train he sprightly steed, mora fleet than those bqot by winds." Not will happy Britain bethe last, for America inherits tho pr opens and strives to better the methods of Britain : France has its Grand Prix, and cherwise imitates with no small success; Auiria-llungary threatens no contemptible rivaly. The sport is, in fact, grounded deep innnture. That it should bo judged, as it oo often is, by its concomitants is palproly absurd. Betting, be it morally peniyicis or be it: not, is an accident and not a puperty. Betting cometh not of races, but f original sin. Even in Homer Idomeneusis ready to bet Ajax son of Oileus "a tripd or a kettle" on a race. Men will ruin thenselves with gambling at fly-100 if nothing letter offers. It is a poor logician who canmt so far discriminate.