Scientific.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2116, 30 January 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

Scientific.

Tiik Domestic Value ok Phosphorous. —Dr. Wedding, and Dr. Frank have brought before the Agricultural Society of Berlin the question of the valuo of phosphorus in rural and domestic economy. They propose the actual trial of the mammal value of the ammonia phosphates of magnesia on a large scale. Salu> vitii Game.-- Lettuce nsed to be considered the proper salad to serve with game, but of late years celery has been given as a substitute with considerable success. With modern " force culture" there is only a brief time in the year when celery is not obtainable, although now many regard as the period when it is at its best. Liquid Fuel. —The utilisation as fuel of the tar, creosote, and other by-pro-ducts of gas making and cooking is receiving much attention in Europe, where many working tests have recently been made. Colonel Sadler, of Sadler and Co. 's Chemical Works, Middlesborough, has patented an invention for burning these products in steam-boilers and tests made on the steamship Emmanual, which used creosote fuel in a recent voyage from Middlesborough to Caen, France, and return, were highly successful. The master and the engineers reported that, though they had encountered very rough weather, the vessel behaved well, and the new fuel and appliances proved most successful. A Laboratory Experiment. —An investigation has been made by Herr W. Peukert, at tho laboratory of the Technical ! High School of Hanover for the purpose of determining how much of the electrical energy supplied to different types of in* candescent lamps reappears as light and heat respectively. In these experiments the heat evolved from tho lamps was ascertained by registering- the rise in temperature of a weight of water in which they were immersed for a stated time. The photometrical measures were made by the aid of Yon Hefnor-Alteneck's normal flame. The illuminating power of the various lamps experimented upon were recorded while they were immersed in water as well as when hanging in the air, the loss of light in the former ease being from ono twenty-fifth to one-eighth with different lamps. As tho result of Herr Peakerfc's examination, it appears that in one of Siemens and Halake's 8* candle incandescent lamps, 74 per cent, of the total work of the current was lost as heat, while twenty-six per cent, was represented by the light emitted. With EdUon's 16-candle lamp, 66 per cent of the current was returned as heat, and 34 per cent, as light. In Swan's 30-candle lamp, 72 per cent, of the current irat transformed into heat, and 28 per cent, into light. A French Darwin* — At a late meeting of the Fronoh Association at | Grenoble, M. D. Mortillet read a paper lon tertiary man before the anthropological section. The question, he said, was not to know whether man already existod in the tertiary epoch as he existed at the present day. Animals varied from one geological stratum to another, and the higher the animal the greater was the variation. It was to be inferred, therefore, that man word vary more rapidly than tho othor mammals. The problem was to discover in the tertiary period an ancestral form of man, a predecessor of the man of historical times. M. do Mortillet affirmed that there were unquestionably in the tertiary strata objects which implied the exist* ance of an intelligent being. These objects have, in fact, been found in two different stages of the tertiary epoch — in the lower tertiary at Thenay, and in the upper tertiary at Otta, in Portugal, and at Puy Courny, in Cantal. These objects proved that at these two distant epochs there existed in Europe animals acquainted with the use of fire, and able more or less to cut stone. During the tertiary period, then, there lived animals less intelligent than the existing man, bat much more intelligent than existing apes. M. de Mortillet givea the name of anthropitheque, or ape man, to the species, which, he maintains, was an ancestral form of historic man, whose skeleton has not yet been discovered, but who has made himself known to us in the clearest manner by his works. A number of flints were exhibited from the strata in question which had been intentionally clipped and exposed to fire. The general opinion of the savants assembled at Genoble was that there can no longer be any doubt of tho existence in the tertiary period of an ancestral form of man. The Teletopometer.— An ingenious instrument for ascertaining tho distance of accessible and inaccessible points from the observer and from each other has been invented by Dr Luigi Cerebotani, a professor of the University of Verona. THa apparatus consists mair'y of a pair of telescopes mounted on a stand and fixed on a tripod for use. The telescopes are both brought to bear on the object, and a reading is then taken from a graduated scale on the instrument, which compared with a set of printed tables, gives the distance. By this means the inventor obviates the neooesity for the base line, which has hitherto had to be laid down in these operations, and he dispenses with all trigonometrical calculations. Distances ran bo measured between far-off objects, and by means of a sheet of paper fixed on 8 drawing-board, a rough : plan of the country under measurement can bo sketched. In the same way the distances of ships at sea, or of moving objects on land can be determined. The apparatus appears to be well adapted for land surveying, and particularly for military purposes.