Items.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XVII, Issue 5205, 11 February 1892, Page 4

Items.

The employment of bloodhounds for military outpost service has lately been tried with great success in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia. The War Office has accordingly decided that, a number of these animals "shall be allotted to every regiment in the above provinces. An editor, who doesn't mind a joke at his own expense, says he went into a chemist's shop recently, and asked for some morphine. The assistant objected to giving it without a prescription. "Why," asked the editor, "do I look like a man who would kill himself ? " " I don't know," said the assistant; "if I looked like you I should be tempted." Poisoning by mussels is a well-known fact. Such poisoning appears in a chronic form in Tierra del Fuego, mussels being abundant on the shores and other kinds of food rare, so that the natives eat large Quantities of the former daily, both of bad and of good quality. According to a doctor of the Argentine fleet, M. Segers, the mussels are rarely injurious at their maximum time of growth, which corresponds with full moon ; but when the moon wanes they become poor and often poisonous. The poisonous quality apparently results from the death of a large number at this time, and the putrefaction of their bodies yielding ptomaines which are absorbed by the surviving mollusks. In any case, the Fuegians are often attacked by a liver complaint, consisting in atrophy of the organ, with jaundiced color of the skin and tendency to liremorrhage ; and M. Segers believes this due to mussel-poison-ing. He finds sulphate of atropine an efficacious antidote.—Nature. There lias appeared a statistical account by the Rev. Mr Merrick of his work among the Protestant women prisoners in Millbank. Mr Merrick kept shorthand notes about the cases which passed through his hands, and he gives the results of his analysis of this record of the lives of some-14.790 women. Out of this number 5823 had been domestic servants, and, strange to say, only 191 of the prisoners had been occupied as ballet dancers, 47 as flower girls, and nine as actresses. Out of 14,110 cases of women who had got into prison, 9443 had been charged with drunkenness and disorderly conduct; and, to quote one more example of these statistics, out of 10,910 cases of Protestant women, 895 knew nothing of what is called religious teaching : 5636 knew something about these matters—perhaps up to the first standard ; 2625 would pass the third standard, 1503 were equal to the third standard, and only 321 were well instructed in religious knowledge.