William Edward Garrett Fisher

“ The life of these sexual forms lasts but a few days, and is entirely taken up with reproduction. The female is fertilized by the male and three or four days later lays a single egg—the winter egg—and then dies. This egg is laid in the crevices of the bark of the vine, and as it is protectively coloured it is almost impossible to find it.
Here the winter eggs remain undeveloped during the cold months; but in the following spring, as a rule in the month of April, they give birth to a female insect without wings, which resembles the root dwelling forms, but has pointed antennae. ”

“ This primitive form of golf is played by Zulu adults with great enthusiasm, and is still popular among the car-drivers of Belfast. (4) “Boss out, or boss and span, also called hit and span, wherein one bowls a marble to any distance that he pleases, which serves as a mark for his antagonist to bowl at, whose business it is to hit the marble first bowled, or lay his own near enough to it for him to span the space between them and touch both marbles; in either case he wins, if not, his marble remains where it lay and becomes a mark for the first player, and so alternately until the game be won.” ”

“ The advantage gained by the use of India paper is the diminution of the weight and bulk of a volume—usually to about one-third of those involved by the use of good ordinary printing paper—without any alteration in the size and legibility of its type and without any loss of opacity, which is an absolute necessity in all papers used for high-class book printing to prevent the type showing through. ”

“ As the summer wears on a second form of insect appears amongst the root-dwellers, though hatched from the same eggs as the form described above. These are the nymphs, destined to acquire wings; their body is more slender in outline, and at first they bear well-marked tubercles. After several moults the rudiments of two pairs of wings appear, and then the insect creeps up to the surface of the earth, and on to the vine. ”

“ A very high surface can be quickly given to paper by friction with the assistance of heat; the process is known as “burnishing,” and is used mostly for envelope papers and wrappings where one surface only of the web is required to be glazed. It is produced by the friction of a chilled-iron roll on one of cotton or paper, the ratio of the revolutions being as 4 to 5; steam is admitted to the burnishing iron roll. ”

“ The well-made and highly valued alleys of earlier times were no longer procurable, owing to the decline in popularity of the sport. In the United States, however, much more expensive and accurately rounded marbles were still manufactured, the latest being of hollow steel.
There has never been any recognized authority on the game of marbles, and it is probable that, in the past as in the present, every parish and school and set of boys made its own rules. ”

“ If, however, the insect were content with this method of reproduction the disease could be isolated by surrounding the infected patches with a deep ditch full of some such substance as coal-tar, which would prevent the insects spreading on to the roots of healthy vines. The fertility of the parthenogenetically produced insects would also diminish after a certain number of generations had been produced. ”

“ The undue introduction of excessive quantities of mechanical or ground wood-pulp in the period 1870–1880 into the cheaper qualities of printing-papers, particularly in Germany, first drew attention to this matter, since it was noticed that books printed on paper in which much of this material had been used soon began to discolour and turn brown where exposed to the air or light, and after a time the paper became brittle. This important question began to be scientifically investigated in Germany about the year 1885 by the Imperial Testing Institution in Berlin. ”

“ The object of the paper-maker in treating any one particular fibre is to carry the action of the dissolving and bleaching agents just so far as to obtain the fibre as free from impurities and as white in colour as is desired. The usefulness of a plant for a good white paper depends upon the strength and elasticity of its fibres, upon the proportion of cellular tissue contained in them, and upon the ease with which this can be freed from the encrusting and intercellular matters. ”

“ Of not less importance are the qualities which belong to paper as a chemical substance or mixture, which are: (1) its actual composition; (2) the liability to change under whatever conditions of storage and use it may be subjected to. For all papers to be used for any permanent purpose these physical and chemical qualities must ultimately rank as regulating the consumption and production of papers. ”

“ In other parts of the country the phraseology of marbles affords some interesting problems for the philologist. We hear of “alleys, barios, poppos and stoneys”; of “marididdles,” home-made marbles of rolled and baked clay; in Scotland of “bools, whinnies, glassies, jauries”; of “Dutch alleys,” and so forth. “Dubs, trebs and fobs,” stand for twos, threes and fours. To be “mucked” is to lose all one’s “mivvies” or marbles. When the taw stayed in the ring it was a “chuck.” ”

“ They lay their parthenogenetically produced eggs in the angles of the veins of the leaves, in the buds, or, if the season is already far advanced, in the bark. In very damp or cold weather the insect remains in the ground near the surface, and deposits its eggs there. The eggs are very few in number and of two sizes, small and large (fig. 3, b and c) . From the larger a female (fig. 4) is hatched in eight or ten days, and simultaneously, for the first time in the life-history of the Phylloxera, a male (fig. 3) appears from the smaller egg. Neither male nor female has wings ”

“ The expense of manufacturing paper in this way is very much greater than by machinery; but the gain in strength, partly owing to the time allowed to the fibres to knit together, and partly to the free expansion and contraction permitted them in drying, still maintains a steady demand for this class of paper.
The paper-machine (fig. 12) consists essentially of an endless mould of fine wire-cloth on which the pulp flows and on which a continuous sheet of paper is formed; the sheet then passes through a series of press rolls and over a number of steam-heated cylinders until it is dry. ”

“ Underneath, between the legs, lies the rostrum, which reaches back to the abdomen. The insect is fixed by this rostrum, which is inserted into the root of the vine for the purpose of sucking the sap. The abdomen consists of seven segments and these as well as the anterior segments bear four rows of small tubercles on their dorsal surface. These root-dwelling insects are females, which lay parthenogenetic eggs. The insect is fixed by its proboscis, but moves its abdomen about and lays thirty to forty yellow eggs in small clusters. ”

“ An alteration of a few feet per minute can be effected by changing the driving-speed of the steam-engine governor; for a greater change the machine must be stopped and other driving-wheels substituted. Arrangements are made in the driving-gear by which the various parts of the machine can be slightly altered in speed relatively to one another, to allow for the varying contraction or expansion of the paper web for different kinds and thicknesses of paper. The average speed of a paper-machine on fine writing-papers of medium weight is from 60 to 90 ft. ”

“ India paper is mostly made upon a Fourdrinier machine in continuous lengths, in contradistinction to a hand-made paper, which cannot be made of a greater size than the frame employed in its production. The material used in its manufacture is chiefly rag, with entire freedom from mechanical wood pulp. The opacity of modern India paper, so remarkable in view of the thinness of the sheet, is mainly due to the admixture of a large proportion of mineral matter which is retained by the fibres. ”

“ Phylloxera.
Winged female which lives on leaves and buds an lays parthenogenetically eggs of two kinds, one developing into a wingless female, the other into a male.They moult five times, becoming with each change of skin darker in colour; in about three weeks they become adult and capable of laying parthenogenetic eggs. In this way the insect increases with appalling rapidity: it has been calculated that a single mother which dies after laving her eggs in March would have over 25,000,000 descendants by October. ”

“ The refiner is essentially a finishing process as an adjunct to the beating process proper. The advantages to be derived from its use are a considerable saving in the time occupied in beating and the production of a more uniform and evenly divided pulp, particularly where a mixture of different fibres is used. By the use of the refiner the time occupied in the beater can be reduced by nearly one-half, the half-beaten pulp passing through the refiner from the beater on its way to the paper-machine. ”