Items.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVI, Issue 5083, 19 September 1891, Page 1

Items.

In concluding his lectures on tho " Story of the Plant Life on the Globe," Mr W. Carrutliers, F.R.S., head of tho botanical department of tho Natural History Museum, traced the evolution of plants through tho pine-trees and cycads of the lower "rocks to tho cretaceous series, where plants similar to those now existing first appeared, and showed how unbroken had been the continuity of vegetable lifo from the first dim traces of seaweeds in tho earliest strata to the complex and highly-differentiated floras at present upon the earth, yet all bearing in form or structure links connecting them with tho remote past, as illustrated in the plant fragments which sank in the ooze and the mud of the prehistoric river and sea, to be found still unchanged in tho rocks of to-day. The old Egyptian lock was not made of metal, like those we use nowadays, but of wood, and the key that opened it was wooden, too On one side of the door to which it was fastened there was a staple, and into this staple fitted a wooden bolt that was fixed to the door itself. When this bolt was pushed into the staple as far as it would go, threo pins in the upper part of the staple dropped into holes in tlic bolt and held it in its place,, so that it could not be moved back again until the pins were lifted. The key was a straight piece of wood, at tho end of which were throe pegs the same distance apart as the pins which held the bolt firm. When the key was pushed into the bolt through a hole made to receive it, tho pegs came into such a position that they were able to lift tho pins that fixed tho bolt, and when these wero lifted, tho bolt could be lifted out of tho staple. Tho most modern locks work on a similar principle.