Various

“ Lucy and Amy, on the other hand, could scarcely conceal their excitement and agitation. They each looked at least a hundred times during dinner at the clock upon the mantel-piece; and they each started and turned red whenever the noise of carriage-wheels without was heard. After dinner, Miss Marrable went again to her room and began to make her preparations.
‘How sad it will be,’ she thought to herself, ‘for poor young Jellicoe when I discover myself and overwhelm him with reproaches. Men are but poor creatures. ”

“ There was the great enemy of mankind, Poverty, with his attendant demons Ignorance and Laziness, still to conquer; and there were legions of starving people crying out to be led against him. Vast territories lay untilled, vast resources of earth, air, and water still unused, to be called forth to content and enrich the hungry and poor. ”

“ It is not now our object to show how the government of India has suffered in the interval by the want of a proper system of forest training in Great Britain. Waste and spoliation went on,{194} of course, uncontrolled. But we think that the raison d’être of a Forestry Exhibition will now be tolerably apparent to at least the majority of our readers. Indeed, the wonder is that Great Britain has so long remained quiescent under the implied reproach of neglecting what is not only a useful but a profitable branch of estate management. ”

“ Life and honour were as much at stake in doing the daily work of the world as in shooting down the foes of the nation or the foes of the nation’s policy. Our merchants, our inventors, our educators, our labourers, were the true soldiers, and their victories were the enduring ones. ”

“ Need it be said that grapes in these regions are cheap—a hatful can be purchased for a few cents! Only think of the above-named Colonel Wilson having ‘two and a half million pounds of grapes, hung up by their stalks, to keep them fresh for the market’! That fine fruit, the peach, is equally cheap in the peach-growing districts of the United States. The annual value of the American peach-crop is estimated at eleven and a half million pounds sterling. In some seasons, peaches are so abundant, that, to prevent their being lost, they are used in immense quantities for the feeding of pigs. ”

“ The houses there are built of such light materials, that when a shock comes, they rattle down like a veritable house of cards, and can almost be rattled together again as easily when the danger has for the time passed. In London and some other of our cities and towns, the houses are so shamefully run up that a very mild shock of earthquake would suffice to shake them to pieces. ”

“ These men are such weak creatures. I must stop the carriage!’ And, throwing down the sash of the window, she put out her head and cried to the driver to pull up his horses. But the driver, like the billiard-marker, had been very liberally feed; and he was determined that nothing should stop him until he reached Harlech; he therefore cracked his whip, to drown Miss Marrable’s voice, and drove down the next hill at a pace which threatened to shake the carriage to pieces. ”

“ Another important consideration that is too often neglected is the acoustic properties of public buildings. Even in the last great work which has, after years of labour, been finished in London—we refer to the new law-courts—complaints are constant from those who have to work in them, of the great difficulty both in making their voices heard and in appreciating what is said by others. ”

“ In fruit-preserving, the English and Scotch boilers—and the latter class have largely increased during the last few years—have a great advantage over their brethren of the continent and the United States, because of the greater cheapness of the sugar, which is required in large quantities. It is to be hoped that the example set by Lord Sudeley will be speedily followed by some of his territorial brethren. As a nation, we could manage to consume much more fruit than we do at present, if we could obtain it at a moderate price. ”

“ British Burmah is, roughly speaking, of the same area as Great Britain and Ireland, with a population less than that of London. This population, under British rule, has doubled in twenty years, and there is every sign of its continued increase. The males are far in excess of the females, and what seems a very important key to the wonderful prosperity of the country is the fact that there are ten acres of cultivated land for every eight persons living in it. ”

“ Twenty years ago, from three to four thousand slaves per annum were shipped from here to Jeddah, and though this monstrous traffic has been much crippled of late years by the Egyptian government, out of regard for English feeling, it is to be feared that it is not yet extinct. Oddly enough, Hassan Mousa Akad, one of the ringleaders in Arabi’s recent rebellion, and the greatest slave-merchant in Egypt, was exiled to this very slave-port of Suakim, hence his complicity in the Soudan disturbances is not unnaturally suspected. ”

“ In some crowded theatres, the air has been said by a competent authority to be more foul than that of the street sewers. The intensely heated air would seem to act as a kind of pump, and to extract the vitiated atmosphere from the drains below the building. The successful introduction of the electric incandescent system of lighting to more than one metropolitan theatre has done much to mitigate the evil complained of; but it is quite certain that the ventilation of public buildings generally does not receive the attention which it so imperatively demands. ”

“ At a recent meeting of the Scotch Fisheries Improvement Association, held at Edinburgh, Mr Harvie-Brown communicated some notes on trout-life, which the Association considered of so much scientific interest, that it was resolved to engross them in the minutes. The notes are as follow:
‘The subject of coloration of flesh of trout is a much more intricate one than at first appears. I know of trout holding largely developed spawn in June and July in a loch in Sutherland, whose flesh is not pink only, but bright red like a salmon’s, and yet are not fit to be eaten. ”

“ The theory of the founders is, that in consequence of the difficulty of obtaining for post-mortem examinations any other subjects but those of the lowest classes, whose faculties are naturally warped or otherwise undeveloped, much benefit must accrue to science by an opportunity being given for the dissection of persons of cultivated understanding, and particularly by making observations on the brain. ”

“ We may not enter into any further categorical enumeration of the purposes and objects of the{195} Forestry Exhibition of 1884; for, if the contemplation of the great cause which primarily led to the idea of the undertaking has brought us insensibly to the enumeration of the good that may be expected to accrue from its successful issue, it seems needless to insist that the probable results of that success will benefit the commercial interests and the scientific knowledge of the world at large. ”

“ To the capital of Scotland, a country lying between the two great fields of the ‘lumbering’ interest of the world—the one in Northern Europe, and the other on the continent of America, the results, if only from the influx of visitors, whether these are scientifically disposed or otherwise, can hardly fail to be beneficial. ”

“ The energy or the nature of the virus varies in each species of animals. By passing the virus through different animals, ‘cultures,’ or varying qualities of virus, are obtained, whose precise effects can be predicted. Thus a ‘culture’ has been obtained which certainly kills a rabbit in five or six days, and another which certainly kills a guinea-pig in the same time. ”

“ But in the low country the trees could be easily cut and floated down to the coast during the annual floods. A country deprived of its trees is doomed to drought; and India soon began to suffer from the reckless destruction of its forests. The officials of the government, while fully aware of the vast waste of capital and revenue going on under their eyes, were quite unable successfully to cope with it. ”

“ The virus of rabies injected into the veins or beneath the skin produces paralytic rabies, while inoculations into the spinal cord or the brain produce the paroxysmal form. Inoculations with quantities of the virus too small to be effective, have no preservative influence against subsequent inoculations. Whether the virus is propagated by means of the nervous tissues or by absorption through the surfaces of the wound, has not been ascertained. Finally, the experiments have shown that the protective ‘attenuation’ of the virus is possible. ”

“ The imports consist of cotton goods, iron, wood, carpets, weapons, steel, and fancy wares. Berber in the east, and Kassala in the south, are the great centres for all the caravan traffic of Suakim, which is also the port on the one side for the whole Soudan—an inland country as large as India—and on the other side, for Arabia. Hence it is much visited by Mohammedan pilgrims to Mecca, their port of Jeddah occupying a corresponding position on the Arabian to that which Suakim does on the African coast. ”

“ Not very many years ago, a map of Africa presented in its centre a blank space, which was explained to inquiring children as indicating a country so hot that nobody had been there or could live there. ”

“ At Toddington, in Gloucestershire, there has been going on for a few years the cultivation of fruit on a very large scale; a fruit-farm of five hundred acres having been planted by Lord Sudeley, and which, we are glad to know, has proved so successful, that its area is about to be enlarged to the extent of other two hundred acres. An enormous number of fruit-trees of many kinds has been planted, along with thousands of currant-bushes, whilst upwards of a hundred acres of the land are devoted to the growth of strawberries. ”

“ The landed proprietor anxious to utilise his present wastes and to make up for deficient rents by profitable planting—the political economist inquiring into new sources of revenue—the botanist uncertain of the right names and uses of some of his specimens of timber or of flowers—the geologist, the sportsman, and the naturalist, will find here a common ground of instruction and amusement. For we may hope to see gathered together the forest products of the world, carefully examined and authentically named ”

“ The wages of farm-labourers have risen to fifty pounds or thereabouts, while only in the case of country blacksmiths have wages declined, the rates for such being now seventy-five to eighty pounds per annum. The colony is stated to be capable of readily absorbing any amount of skilled agricultural labour, especially that of the handy kind, without affecting the current rates of wages. Agricultural labour is in more demand than artisan labour, and good industrious hands would do excellently, as compared with the same class in England, both in regard to food and pay. ”

“ He tells us that ‘it is impossible to conceive a worse piece of construction, and it is equally impossible to understand how it is that these piers have stood so long.’ The piers have simply been enabled to hold together by the strength of their exterior clothing. It is some small satisfaction to the modern householder that dishonest building has not been invented for his especial torment, but was practised as long ago as the fourteenth century.
Another far more valuable relic of the past is, as we recently indicated, exciting attention on account of its decaying condition. ”

“ While so much is written of the internal economy of Russia, many will be surprised to hear of the extraordinary extent of the lands which form the{205} estates of the Crown. The extent of the possessions of the Russian emperor may be gathered from the fact that the Altai estates alone cover an area of over one hundred and seventy thousand square miles, being about three times the size of England and Wales. The Nertchinsk estates, in Eastern Siberia, are estimated at about seventy-six thousand six hundred square miles, or more than twice the size of Scotland and Wales put together. ”

“ This long duration of the action of the feeble light from stars so remote that they cannot be seen by the naked eye, has the effect of impressing the chemical surface so that the invisible is pictured! ”

“ Remarkable or historical trees will be represented by paintings, photographs, and drawings; and there will be sketches of the usual forest operations.
Collections of forest produce, specially illustrating the sources of supply, and the methods of manufacture in different provinces, with accompanying Reports, are solicited by the Committee. And essays on all subjects touching on the value of growing trees or timber are invited to competition for prizes. Here, again, is opened a very wide field of useful inquiry for all those interested in the planting of woods in our own or foreign countries ”

“ It is evident that a new field of research is thus opened out; and the President did well in pointing out what great services can be rendered to knowledge by the amateur worker who, like Mr Common, has the means and the ability to employ his time so well. ”

“ And when—as is almost necessarily the case—an appeal is made to the pockets of the public in the initiatory stage of the undertaking, objectors are not few in number, and not particularly partial, or even moderate, in the nature of their criticisms. Within due bounds, indeed, it is well that it should be so. Exhibitions got up mainly or entirely for the purpose of advertising any particular branch of trade, may be advantageous to that trade individually ”