WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 29, Issue 40, 25 May 1917, Page 2

WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

OLD-TIME VOTERS

In parts of New Zealand/ during the seventeenth century voters had to reside in a “stone house of the dimensions of 20 feet by 10 Icet, with one or more brick chimney or chimneys. Each voter had also to be certified by his neighbours “of sober and peaceful conversation." In Connecticut every candidate for the local assembly had to furnish a certificate from the select men of the town where he resided that he was of “quiet i and peaceable behaviour and civil conversation." THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG. Here is a fine descriptive writing on the wonderful effect of the nightingale's song . v. Then, in the solemn stillness, the nightingale began to sing. Three clear notes rang out from the echoing coppice ; it was like the voice of the organ in a great church. It sounded over the fields, to die away in a low, hushed fluting. Now, louder and staccato, like the spiral stair of metallic sound, the notes rang out, high and low’ alternately, in quickening time, a running, rustling and rioting, with long-drawn pipings, wonderfully sweet, that rose in a storm of hell-like tiuklings, limpid as water, with a strength, a violence a precision exceeding the music of a hundred thousand tipsy carillons pealing through the silent night. And now again the notes were softly weaving their fabric of sound ; bewitchingly quiet, intimately sweet, musingly careful, like the music of tiny glass bells ; and once more they were louder and again they fainted away, borne on the still wind like the murmur of angels praying. AN OLD WORLD CHISEL. Speaking before a meeting of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at London, Sir Robert Hadfield said that when in Ceylon he paid a visit to the Colombo Museum, and there found some very extraordinary chisels. He had been somewhat puzzled to Understand how, in those days, they got the necessary hardness for cutting purposes. On analysing the chisel in question it was found to be practically pure iron, so far as the shaft portion was concerned, and as the chisel dated back to the early period of the Christian era it was evident that a knowledge of some method of producing a hardened point to the chisel must have existed at that time, since it was impossible to think of wrought iron being made to accomplish the desired work. It was a curious thing to bear in mind that, in those days, they must have known the art of cementation ; if they took wrought iron and embedded it in a charcoal fire, they might get a certain amount of carbon absorbed -.by the point, which, after quenching-, would give a cutting edge. STRANGE PETS. 'Hie chameleon belongs to the lizard family, and is a slow, ugly creature, and the last thing on earth you would think of making a pet of, yet in spite of its appearance it is quite gentle and harmless., British soldiers in Egypt keep these little creatures in their tents and make pets of them too. They have the appearance of a kind of lizzard, only longer in body. The claws or digits have each five toes, three extended in one direction and two in another, by which it grasps the branches of trees, but when these are too thick it has recourse to its tail, which it coils round them' while it forces its claws into the hark.

They are veritable quick-change artistes in the way in which they repeatedly change colour according to the surroundings. For instance, when climbing the trunk of a tree they turn the same colour as the bark, and when among leaves they turn a vivid green, but what amuses our soldiers most is the adroit and expeditious manner in which the’y dispose of flies, and this is mainly what they keep them for. They will sit nearly 2ft. off a fly, when suddenly out shoots its sticky, club-shaped tongue, and in goes the fly, to the great amusement of our soldiers.

THE BYE OF THE GUN. This is called the telemeter and is used by all artillerists in some shape or other. The telemeter is really a tube with two telescopic lenses, one on each end. The “objectives” of the two lenses are placed inside the instrument and towards the end of the tube. Prisoms with five faces act as reflectors, so that the person looking in has mechanically spread his eyes to the two ends of the tube, with a tremendous range of vision.

Of course, the ends are so arranged that they may be directed at a single object at the same time, thus making it possible for the observer to see what would otherwise be beyond the power of the human eye, and to know, by the angle at which it is viewed, the distance away.

It requires a little practice to use this wonderful instrument, but in a few days the operator ascertains how easily he can determine the precise distance he is from the object he is looking at, and by a quick calculation he directs the pointing of the gun so that it cannot fail to strike at the desired spot.