Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1884 — CURIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC. [ARTICLE]

CURIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC.

A recipe for the removal of rust from steel with the least abrasion is to rub sweet oil well into the affected parts, leaving it for forty-eight hours, at. the expiration of which time the article is to be well rubbed with finely pulverized unslaked lime. . Field daisies have been colored By? placing their cut stems in anilifie violet ink. They refused to absorb any color from black ink. Peonies have been colored as they grow by applying various dyes in solution to the ground in which they stood. A correspondent suggests the use of wind-wheels to drive dynamo electric machines to decompose water. He would store the resulting gases in suitable holders, to be used when desired for lighting purposes, or for heating, or for any employment for which such gases may be available. A correspondent of nature believes that such vast quantities of gas as must have been freed by the Java catastrophe have necessarily affected the earth’s atmosphere, and thinks, that the fine weather of September, prevalent over a large portion of the earth, may have been the result of the great eruption. In many of the business houses of Paris, and especially in those oi which the cellars are used as offices, glass is now being extensively employed instead of boards for flooring. At the headquarters of the Credit Lyonnais, on the Boulevard des Italiens, the whole of the ground-floor is paved with large squares of roughened glass embedded in a strong iron frame, and in the cellars beneath there is, even on dull days, sufficient light to enable the clerks to woi k without gas. M. Vieusse, principal medical officer of the medical hospital at Oran, states that excessive sweating of the feet, under whatever form it appears, can be quickly cured by carefully conducted friction with the subnitrate of bismuth, and even in the few cases this suppresses the abundant sweating only temporarily it still removes the severe pain and the fetidity which often accompany the secretion. Dr. Vieusse has never found any ill consequences to follow the suppression of the sweating. To ascertain if any textile fabric is of vegetable or animal material take a small piece of it and hold it near the glowing coals. Cotton or linen fibres will burn with flame and leave only a slight ash. Another method is to put some of the threads, separated into small fibres, into nitric acid. Silk will turn to bright yellow, wool to a darker yellow, and cotton or flax will remain colorless. If the fibres are boiled with the acid awhile the proportion of vegetable or animal material can be judged by the amount of colored and colorless threads. The heart’s action is one of the vital processes which is least subject to the control or influence of will-power, but there was one exceptional case, an Englishman? wHo could voluntarily check the heart’s beat and pulse, and finally he exhibited this power so effectually that he died by it. A physician in Harrison, Ohio, has met a healthy German who can exercise this checking of the heart, and wjio wants to make it profitable by exhibitions of his curious power. Unless he has equal ability to start up the machine again after putting on the brakes, he ha< what may prove to be a fatal capacity.— Dr. Foote's Health Monthly.