OLLA PODRIDA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 752, 30 July 1886, Page 5

OLLA PODRIDA.

NEURALGIA. One of the best remedies for neuralgia is quinine. In all cases in which there is any suspicion of -ague, or when the patient is residing in a district where ague, is prevalent, this is the remedy to give. It is indicated, too, when the attacks come on at regular intervals. It has long been recognised that quinine readily controls that form of neuralgia in which the pain is experienced at a sjjot just above one or other of the eyebrows. Quinine, to do any good in neuralgia, must be taken in fairly large doses thus two tablespoonfuls of strong quinine mixture should be taken every four hours. Some chemists now keep iive-grain quinine pills, made up with a drop or two of syrup ; and, by many, these will be preferred to the mixture ; one should be taken every four hours. Quinine is said to control neuralgia and ordinary faceaehe more effectively when the powder is taken in small quantities every few minutes —as much, for instance, as will adhere to the tip of the finger dipped into the powder. We need hardly point out the importauce of getting your quinine pure. The three great indications for the use of quiuine are being periodical; (3) pain being experienced chiefly over eyebrow. In very obstinate cases of neuralgia, which have resisted all other treatment, the Germans often give what w'e should consider enormous dose 3 of quinine—from forty grains to two drachms a day.— Family Physician. THE GUN TRADE. The annual meeting of the Birmingham gun trade was held on Tuesday Mr S B. Allport in the ehair. In moving the adoption of the report of the Proof-house Guardians, the chairman referred to the remarkable decline which had taken place in the Birmingham gun trade during the past year. At their last meeting they were able to show on their proofs for the iwelvemonths an increase of about 2 per :ent., though there was a decrease of ■evenue of 8 per cent, consequent on the eduction of charges. This year, however, le was sorry to say, they had a decrease in he number of proofs to the extent of 92,000, or about £S per cent, of the number ast year. This was a most alarming lecrease, and the cash revenue had dirnin3hed in about the same proportion. He ttributed this depression to a general hrinkage in all classes of &rms. With the id of a sketch he traced the fluctuations

in the English and Belgian gun trade during the past twenty years or so, observing that since 1875 the Belgian trade had been steadily growing in volume as compared with the home trade. Last year there was a remarkable decline In the prosperity of the home trade. This, he thought, was in some measure attributable to the disturbed political condition of the country, and to the influence of foreign tariffs. What affected them most, however, was the competition with cheap foreign labor, which he regarded as a very serious element in the causes cf the present shortness of trade. The condition of the Birmingham artisan was in every way superior to that of his Belgian brother, but he was less thrifty, many makers knew very well that some of the men who earned the highest wages had no money left in their pockets by Tuesday morning. They lived too well. During the past year a quantity of goods had been sent to the proof-house which the authorities were compelled to reject on account of their inferior quality. The report was adopted. THE PROGRESS OP BEER DRINK ING IN AMERICA. Beer, it would seem, is rapidly replacing the fantastic ‘ drinks for which the United States have earned a reputation, and is in a fair way to become the national beverage. The quantity of beer now consumed is, in proportion to the population, eleven times as great as it was forty pears ago. Some, perhaps, not altogether disinterested, persons appear anxious to get up a scare about beer ; and are endeavouring to prove that it is a beverage peculiarly dangerous to health, causing degeneration of the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. The evidence, however, in support of this charge is not overwhelming ; it is said, for instance, that the hearts of the men of Munich are larger than those of other people, and more ready j to undergo fatty degeneration ; and that the number of people who die of Bright’s disease, in New York, has increased since beer became a popular beverage. Evil tales are told of adulteration, but they have not found much confirmation in the analyses made for the State Board of Health ; and there is reason to fear that even whisky is sometimes tampered with. On the whole, ihi3 change in the drinking habits is a matter for congratulations, even if it be true that he who drinks beer thinks beer. Still, our somewhat mercurial cousins may be none the worse for the infusion of a little Teutonic stolidity. There is, however, one kind of ale which is best of all—that of Adam.—British Medical Press. A THREATENED JEWISH LANDMARK IN ENGLAND. The Bevis Marks Synagogue, the only building of genuine historical interest in England which the Jews can boast, is at the present moment threatened with destruction at the hands of a portion of its own governing body, to the dismay of the majority of its congregants and of the community in general—at least of those of them who prefer sentiment and old associations to merely money considerations and convenience. ‘ Bevis Marks ’ is not, a 3 many erroneously suppose, the first synagogue ever founded here. The Jews, who settled in England about A.D. 750, are known to have possessed one in Old Jewry, in the earlier portionof the Twelfth century, but the building together with all the other traces of Hebrew settlement, was swept away when, a little more than a century later, at the instance of the Pope, the whole Jewish colony, numbering nearly 17,000 persons, was banished from the country. In 1555 Sixtus Y. rescinded the edict against the Jews, but it was not till 1650, or 730 years after their exile, that they ventured to return. The permission to settle was ac corded, or at any rate not withheld, by Oliver Cromwell, the Jews’ great benefactor at the time, in answer to the prayer Menassah ben Israel, a rabbi much esteemed by the Protector, who a few years later granted him a pension. No sooner was the new colony founded than they set about establishing a synagogue in King street, Duke’s place ; but after forty years’ service the building being found insufficient for its purpose, was pulled down and was replaced by the present large and quaint edifice in Bevis Marks. The section of the Jewish community who thus succeeded in gaining a foothold in England consisted almost exclusively of the Hebrew ‘ aristocracy ’ — learned, large-minded men who had been merchant princes, philosophers and doctors in Spain and Portugal, trusted and honored by their respective countries before they too were thrown into exile • and they trace back their noble line of descent—for no one is more proud of birth and blood than your Spanish or Portuguese Jew—and point out with pride how their ancestors were men of light or leading, and power too, when their brethren of Germany and Poland—the later importation into England —• were trafficking as pedlars and money lenders and such other miserable occupations as the .persecution of their oppressers graciously permitted them to carry on. Thus the present synagogue Bevis Marks (originally Buries Marks, the spot occupied by the Abbots of Bury) is the chief, and indeed the only, monument of Anglo-Judea worth preserving on account of its interesting historical associations ; the only link binding the latter-day Jew to his much-beloved past. Ball Mall Gazette.

THE ROMANCE OF GOLD. Fate of the Men Who Discovered Some of the Great .American Mines. The superstitious belief is an old one that unless the discoverer of a camp meets an untimely or bloody end his find will never amount to anything ; and this seems borne out by facts, since nearly all the discoverers of the great gold mines of the United States, with but few exceptions, have as the saying goes, “ died with their boots on.” Of thirtyebdit booming towns of early days, the locators of twelve were killed by bullet, three were buried in their creations by cave-ins and the rest drifted away with the tide of immigration, have become lost in oblivion or died and were buried in paupers’ graves. George H. Fryer, from whom the celebrated “.Fryer Hill’ of Leadville derives its name, died at Denver not long ago

from an overdose of morphine administered by his own hand. Two years previous to his death he was worth a million or so, but he died a pauper and almost without a friend.

Old Virginnv, after whom the “ Consolidated Virginia ” was named, and who sold his claim for $25, a pony and a bottle of whisky, came to his death by an overdose from a bucking mule near Dayton, Nev. Bill Bodie, the discoverer of the great Standard mine in Mono County Cal., slept his life away in a snowstorm while making making his way to the mines. Col. Storey, who gave his name to the county in Nevada where the Comstock is situated, was killed in battle by the Pyramid Lake Indians.

Thomas Page Comstock died a beggar in a strange land. “ Old Pancake,” as he was known in the mining camps committed suicide at Bozeman, M.T., on September 27, 1870, by shooting himself. He was the leader of the famous Big Horn Expedition that was sent out by Nevada capitalists in search of the Lost Cabin mines, supposed to. be somewhere among the Big Horn Mountains. The expedition was a failure, and Comstock, whether from disappointment or from some other cause, while encamped near Bozeman, drove a pistol-ball through his head and died instantly. He was buried there, and his grave is unmarked and unknown. Near the wild spot where twelve years before the hidden treasure of Alder Gulch was first revealed to him, Wiliam Fairweather was laid down to rest. Like poor “Old Pancake,” this erratic soul stranded on the shoals of dissipation, although tach in his day had turned the key—the one silver, the other golden—which unlocked millions for others but nothing for themselves. William Farrell, who “ struck ” Meadow Lake, died a victim to remorse in one of the leading hospitals of San Francisco “haunted by the spirits of 1000 deluded pioneers and prospectors passing and repassing his dying bed. The locator of the famous Homestake, in the Black Hills, is said to have afterward turned road agent. Times going hard with him he attempted to stop a stage loaded and prepared for just such emergencies and he was planted alongside the road by the tender-hearted express agents whom he tried to rob and kill. Homer, of the Homer district, followed in the suicidal tracks of Comstock. After squandering a small fortune he shot his brains out on the streets of San Franscisco. Doughnut Bill, “ Old Eureka,” Kelse Austin, Lloyd Magruder, “ Nine Mile Clarke,” George Hankinson, Henry Plummer, and scores of others died violent deaths in one way or another and reaped nothing from the rich finds each had made in his day. Doughnut Bill was planted in the Lone Mountain Cemetery in Utah, in 1868 ; a lone grave under a white pine tree in a frontier mining town of California tells where poor “ Old Eureka sleeps his last sleep ; Kelse Austin was killed and buried in Elko county, Nev., fifteen years ago. Lloyd Magruder, while conducting a number of waggons loaded with treasure from Virginia City to the nearest railroad, was murdered and robbed by his teamsters, who were Plummer’s outlaws in disguise ; George Hankinson and Henry Plummer were hauled up by vigilantes and strung up without the delay and formality of a trial. Plummer was a great rascal. In the early days of the mining camps of Montana, Plummer was elected Sheriff of the camp about Virginia City. He was the first locator of the rich ground about Virginia City, bub thought he could make money, and quicker, too, by taking what was .already mined, than by laboring in the gulch day after day and getting it by hard honest toil. But he was tripped up at last, and died a cringing, miserable cowardhbn a gallows of his own construction. —Fort Keogh, M.T., letter.

A Correspondent writes : “ Under the name of the ‘ phonophore ’ a remarkable telephonic invention is about to be introduced to public notice by Mr Langdon Davies. The name is given to a centrivance which, while absolutely a non-conductor of continuous electric currents, still allows of the passage or transmission of rapidlj’- alternating currents such as correspond to vocal and harmonic telephony. The ‘ phonophore ’ itself may be regarded as at once a condenser and an induction coil. It consists essentially of two insulated wires laid side by side, twisted together and wound up upon a bobbin, one end of each wire being completely insulated. Regarded as a condenser, its capacity is very feeble indeed. Regarded as an induction coil, it will be seen that neither the primary nor the secondary forms a closed circuit. Yet it transmits telephonic speech perfectly. It follows that Mr Langdon Davies has solved the problem of telephoning on an open circuit. But the real object of the invention is to enable telephonic messages, including both vocal and harmonic under that name, to be transmitted through the ordinary telegraph-wires without interfer ence with or from the telegraph messages that are simultaneously passing through the wires. For many months Mr Langdon Davies has been at w r ork experimenting upon the line of telegraph-wire running across the county of Kent. He has devised a whole series of telephonic appaiatus in which not only the induction coils of the transmitters, but also the bobbin of the receivers, are replaced by open-circuit phonophore coils. Apart from its purely technical value, the new instrument presents points of great scientific interest, and opens up sundry new* problems to the mathemetical physicist.” Nature.