OLLA PODRIDA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 889, 15 March 1889, Page 6

OLLA PODRIDA.

NOT NEARLY SO BAD AS WE ; SEEMIt is true that in those earlier ages men died for faith, principle, ideas ; but so do they in this age. Every day throughout the world men are taking flying leaps to death because of their fidelity to ideas. The poor switchman that leaped on the railroad tr,.ck in front of the rapidly moving train and flung two little children from it, but met his own death under the murderous wheels of the ponderous machine, died because of his idea of duty. It was not his duty to fling away his life for that of others, but he thought it was, and he did it. S ■ If- sacrifice, unselfishness of the highe.it and nohioit. sui t, is lu.fc of any particular nge but o! all ages. The spirit of compromise is the spirit of selfishness, aud it is not an exclusive growth of the present time. Indeed, it would bo dillicult, if not impossible, to find any other period of the world’s history in which the spirit of charity, of good-will toward men, was more sentient or active than it is to-day. It is nob only in this country, but in all countries, that benevolence flows in a steady stream from the rich to the poor. The land is thick with great charities. We need but look about any great city like this to recognise how strong and broad and deep the stream of charity flows. It is epitomised in scores of institutions kept alive at a most enormous cost for the helpiug of those who need help ; there are hospitals, homes, asylums, refuges, Bchools numberless, which all represent the world’s unselflsnness, its liberality and charity. This age is not worse, bnt better than these which went before it, because there is ever a potent spirit abroad in it helping and improving it. Religion, education, social usages, are all employed in shaping the world to better ends, and they are doing it effectually. If there are great riches they are more equally divided than ever before, and if there is still selfishness in the world, there is also charity, and if there is abroad the cowardly spirit of compromise there is similarly the noble one of heroic endeavour and self-sacrifice.—Phila-delphia Telegraph. BARBAROUS AMUSEMENTSAs Europeans we are apt to pictuie ourselves in the van of modern culture. Let us grant that, on the yvhole, this position is deserved, and there still remains occasion for discontent. If we look at some of our amusements, we must admit that they are little, if at ail, more civilised than the cruel barbarities which marked the decline of ancient Romo. Take, as an instance, what happened lately in Vienna. A young woman is allowed to perform on a trapeze holding a child in her teeth, and falls to the ground, with the result that both were dreadfully injured. In such a case it is difficult to say whether the reckless performer or those who countenance her feat are the most culpable. However we view the matter, humanity is a loser. We are slowly learning in some things, happily for ourselves that violence and brutality do not constitute the rule of manhood. Cockfights, bull-baitings, and prize-rings are not now in fashion, yet we hear no impeachment either of our national courage or of the quality of our live stock. It is high time we were seoking a further stage of improvement in the matter of show performances. It is time for us to admit that strength, courage, and skill, in their most healthy development, are compatible with an absence of foolhardiness. In order that acrobats or boxers may justify their existence it is not needful that they should nearly kill themselves or others. A section of public opinion, indeed, still is tolerably indifferent to these excesses ; but the tide is turning and there are many others who will agree that money spent on shows of this kind is little better than a bribe to do mischief. —Lancet.

WOUNDS OF THE HEART. Dr Simon Thomas of Rotterdam relates two oases of wounds of the heart which are of some interest. The first is that of a girl who was stabbed by her lover in a fit of jealousy with an ordinary household knife. After receiving the wound she got up from her seat, aud ran into another room, where she dropped and died in five minutes, having gone a distance of about eight yards from the spot where she was stabbed. The necropsy showed that the knife had passed in a slanting direction from the upper border of the second right costal cartilage, through the sternum at the junction of the manubrium with the corpus sterni, through the right auricle, behind the pulmonary artery, and finally through* the aorta.. The pericardium was full of blood, the heart firmly contracted and empty ; and it was the pressure of this effused blood, unable to escape, that caused the heart to stop beating. Very little haemorrhage had taken place externally, but the right pleural cavity was filled with blood.'' The main points of interest in this case, Dr Thomas thinks, are the ease with which the knife penetrated the sternum, ‘like going through butter,’ and the distance the girl ran after the injury. The other case was that of a labourer, who was stabbed with a sheath-knife by one of his fellow workmen, whom ho was annoying. The knife entered at a spot seven centimetres to the left of the sternum, between the third aud forth ribs. It pierced the anterior edge of the lung and the pericardium, and made a great gaping wound in the left ventricle. The pericardium was full of blood, the heart not contracted, and the left pleural cavity so full of biood that the lung was collapsed. In (.his case death followed almost immediately after the injury. Dr Thomaß ascribes this suddenneess to the fact * that so much blood emptied itself in so short a time through the great gaping ventricular wound that the further duration of life was impossible.’—Lancet. ELECTRIC SHOCKS. Mr George A. Mayo, the electrician of the Van Depoele Company, has been interviewed on the subject of electric shocks. Mr Mayo received a shock of 3,200 volts some two years ago while acting as electrician of the Narragansett Electric Light Company, of Providence, Rhode Island. This, it is olainse.l is the heaviest shook of electricity that a human being ever survived. Mr Mayo was thrown on a fifty arc light dynamo and received the full force of the current. His sematiou on first receiving the shock, he states, was not at all unpleasant, and there was absolutely no pain, it instantly destroying all feeling except the roaring in the ears, and lie compares the effect upon the system with that of laughing gas. The treatment used to restore him to consciousness was the use of several buckets full of water, and hard rubbing. His hands were terribly burned, but aside from that he received no permanent injury save that he thinks his nervous.system never quite recovered from the shock. Mr. Mayo is hardly in favour of the law in the state of New York requiring the infliction of the doath penalty by means of electricity, inasmuch as it has not so far been practically demonstrated what shock is necessary to kill absolutely and under all circumstances without a hope of resuscitation.—Electrical Review. A CLEVER WOMAN. Once, while travelling in the West, she was obliged to take a seat in one crowded car, while her friend entered the next. Her neighbour in the seat was a disagree-able-looking fellow, whose features showed an alarming amount of low cunning, promisiug actual knavery. In spite of the Englishwoman’s distrust of him, she fell asleep, and was awakened by feeling her companion withdrawing his hand from her pocket. Her first impulse was to raise an alarm ; her second, to ascertain the extent of her loss. It proved that the thief had only succeeded in taking her baggage checks, and as his ticket was marked ‘ Chicago,’ the lady resolved to wait until they reached that place, also her destination. The train ran into the station at Chicago, the pickpocket made his way to the door, and the lady walked beside him. A baggage express messenger was passing by the car and the lady stopped him. ‘ This gentleman has the checks to my baggage,’ she raid, pointing to the thief. Tile messenger turned to the man who, astonished at the suddenness with which the tables had been turned, hastily produced the checks and disappeared in the crowd.—From an Englishwoman in America, THE YEAR 1900The following explanation is given why the year 1900 will not be counted among leap-years. The year is 365 days, five hours, and forty-nine minutes long ; eleven minutes are taken e very year to make the year 365 J days long, and every fourth year we have an extra day. This was Julius Caesar's arrangement. Where do these eleven minutes come from ? They come from the future, and are paid by omitting leap year every hundred years. But if leap-year is omitted regularly every hundredth year, in the course of 400 years it is found that the eleven minutes taken each year will not only have been paid back, but that a whole day will have been given up. So Pope Gregory XIII., who improved on Csesar’s calendar in 1582, decreed that every eenturial year divisable by four should be a leap-year after all. So we borrow eleven minutes each yoar, more_ than paying our borrowings back by omitting three leap-years in three eenturial years, and square matters by having a leap-year in the fourth eenturial year. Pope Gregory’s arrangement is so exact, and tho borrowing and paying back balance so closely, that we borrow more than we pay back to the extent of only one day in 3,866 years.

THE FOOT OF THE CAT. It is needless to say that the cat has never adapted itself to either snow or water. And yet the foot of the cat has been modified from its most perfect form, as found in the lion and tiger, where the formation is so beautifully fitted to leaping and alighting. In the latter particular, the adjustment of the muscles and bones to a minimum of shook is marvellous. The man who jumps down but a few feet, and, despite his utmost efforts to save himself, nevertheless jars his whole frame, can best marvel at the ease with which the members of the cat family alight from great heights. Even the ponderous body of the lion or tiger makes hardly more noise than a rubber ball coming to the ground. From the lion to the cheetah the foot is essentially the same, but it is nevertheless modified in minor particulars to suit the differing conditions of the various members of the great family. PERUVIAN WHISTLING JUGSThe silvadors or musical jugs found among the burial places of Peru are most ingenious specimens of handiwork. A silvio in the William S. Vaux collection at Philadelphia consists of two vases, whose bodies are joined one to the other, with a hole or opening between them. The neck of one of these vases is closed, with the exception of a small opening in which a clay pipe is inserted leading to the body of the whistle. When a liquid is poured into the open-necked vase, the air is compressed into the other, and in escaping through the narrow opening is forced into the whistle, the vibrations producing sounds. Many of these sounds represent the notes of birds ; one in the Clay collection of Philadelphia, Pa., imitates the notes of the robin or some other member of the thrush tribe peculiar to Peru. The closed neck of this double vase is modelled into a representation of a bird’s head, which is tbruat-like in character. HEN AND DUCK. In a note on sympathy and foster.parentage among birds, Mr Palmer tells a curious story of a wood-duck and a hen. * Some time ago,’ he said, * a boy brought in an egg found near a water-hole, which was placed with other eggs under a sitting hen, aud in due course hatched out a wood-duok. The wood-duck was reated among a clutch of chickens, was as well tended as her other chicks by the mother hen, and reached adult age. On one occasion a hen brought out a brood of chiokens, and the wood-duck kept in close companionship with the hen and chicks for several days, until the hen took umbrage at the duck’s constant attendance, and several fights between the hen and duck ensued. Eventually the duck drove away the hen, and took sole charge of the chickens throughout the day, the hen following round disconsolately till nightfall each day, when the duck surrendered her charge, allowing tho mother to brood over them at night, but again taking charge of them in the morning. This continued till the chickens were able to take care of themselves.’ HOW SMALL-POX SPREADSA Maidstone journal gives an account of a girl suffering from small-pox, who was allowed to leave the house and journey from Maidstone to Yalding in an ordinary railway carriage. Tho railway officials, it is stated, knew nothing of her illness, and therefore no steps were taken to prevent other people from entering the compartment or to disinfect it. We may hope the Maidstone authority will institute a prosecution, with a view to preventing similar occurrences in future ; but the event is interesting, because it shows the ease with which persons may contract this disease if they remain susceptible to its influence. A local authority may enforce the compulsory notification of infectious disease and the removal of the infectious sick to the hospital, but if vaccination and revaecination be omitted, the carelessness of one individual may imperil a whole community.—Lancet. HILLS AND DALES ON THE OCEAN. We have all been taught to believe that the ocean, after allowing for tide-waves and wind-waves, has a level surface ; that there are no hills or valleys on the waters. M. Bouquet de la Grye has disputed this, has, in fact, demonstrated its fallacy. If we take a U‘ s^a P e( i tube with distilled water of equal temperature on both sides, the two surfaces will be perfectly level; but if one side contains a liquid that is denser thaa that on the other, more of the lighter liquid is required to balance the heavier, and therefore the lighter will stand at a higher level. If fresh water is on one side and salt water on the other, equilibrium can only be estab. lished by the fresh water standing a little higher than the salt. The like must happen if we have a uniform liquid, as regards composition, but of unequal temperature. Such variations occur in the ocean. Where rivers ara pouring large quantities of fresh water into the sea, and where icebergs are rapidly melting, the salinity is proportion, ately lower than other parts. The temporature also varies, and therefore an equilibrium can only be attained by variations of level; the lighter water must stand higher than the denser, whether the difference be due to temperature or salinity. Thus in crossing the warm Gulf Stream a ship sails uphill on entering, proceeds thus ta somewhere about the middle, and then descends. In this respect it resembles a flowing river, which is similarly crested towards the middle of the stream ; it is also like a river in being higher at its source than at its embouchure, as its temperature gradually declines in the coarse of its northward progress.—Gentleman’s Magazine.

A curious invention has been produced in the shape of a noiseless clock, for use moie especially in sick rooms. In place of the usual pendulum the hands are set in motion by the unrolling of a chain, the end of which is fastened to a buoy, floating in a tank of liquid. This fluid escapes at a uniform rate, and can be utilised to feed a lamp wick, thus giving the apparatus the double character of clock and lamp.