The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-01-23 00:00:00

THE STOURBRIDG-E OBSERVER.

of more railway accommodation, so that labourers
might live in the outskirts in order to avoid the con-
stant tendency to deterioration. Much improve-
ment was needed in the government of the metro-
polis, and it should take the direction of a munici-
pality for the whole of London with the Lord
Mayor at the head. The Board of Works should
be elected by the whole of the ratepayers, and its
powers so enlarged as to deal with the abuses of water
and gas supply. As to the state of crime he stated
that the criminal classes in London only constituted 1
in 1,111 of the population, while in the agricultural
districts the proportion was 1 in 378, in the cotton
manufacturing districts 1 in 568, and in the woollen
districts 1 in 484, the proportion of indictable offences
and the summary convictions being equally favourable
to the metropolis. Londoners also seemed to be more
saving than the inhabitants of provincial towns,
for the amount of deposits in savings banks, exclusive
of private and Post-office banks, amounted to £2 per
head of the population in Middlesex, against 21 lls. 7d.
in Lancashire, and £llos. in Yorkshire. Londonhe de-
clared to be the cheapest capital in Europe to live in, not
having increased either in house rent or the cost of pro-
visions in proportion to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels,
Florence, or New York. Comparing the commerce of
London and Liverpool, he gave the import of mer-
chandise into London. in 1873 as £128,000,000, while
into Liverpool it was £113,000,000; but, on the other
hand, Liverpool in the same year exported goods to
the value of £93,000,000, while the exports of London
only reached £57,000,000. London, however, was,
after all, the great centre of commerce and finance for
all the world. After an attempt to estimate the mate-
rial wealth of the metropolis, which he thought below
the mark if put at £1,000,000,000, the leeturer con-
cluded by a flattering tribute to the wealth which
• cannot be estimated—the scientific and artistic skill,
the manufacturing knowledge and the industry which
have made this country what it is, and may be relied
on in the future to still further increase our national
prosperity.

trouble' they had been run to earth, proved to be
peaceful swindlers in a line of business quite remote
from abduction. But for the details of 'the search we
must again refer our readers to our Correspondent's
narrative,
At last, about the Ist of October, the New York
police got fairly on the right track. The first.due
to it had been given some six weeks. earlier.
Towarols the end of August a man named Clinton
Mosier had made a communication to the Superinten-
dent of the New York Police. It was to the effect
that he suspected his own brother, 'William Mosier,
who, previously to this abduction, had actually pro-
posed similar crimes to him. By degrees it was made
out that William Mosier had a dove friend, much
younger than himself, named Joseph Clark; that the
two had been carrying on a sort of peddling trade at
Philadelphia before the abduction • and that iminc.
diately after it they had left Philadelphia for New
York. Their appearance tallied with Walter Ross's
description. By the beginning of October the police
had reason to believe that the men had taken to
boats, and were afloat on the waters about New
York. A coasting expedition was organized. The
Hudson was explored to some distance. A steam-
launch was employed in patrolling Long Island.
Sound. Meanwhile, Mosier and Clark were ac-
tually in hiding among the innumerable desolate
islands of which Long Island Sound is full. They
lived by occasionally landing and robbing houses on
the island or the mainland, and selling their booty in
New York. But their "fence," or thieves' market,
in New York was discovered, and for a month they
seem to have ventured on only one visit to the city,
until, on the 14th of December, their doom over-
took them. At Bay Ridge, Long Island, there are
many villas belonging to wealthy inhabitants of
New York and Brooklyn, one of these being the
summer residence of a Judge Van Brunt. In
December that gentleman's brother and nephew
were living in a house close by. The Judge's un-
occupied house was connected with his brother's
house by a contrivance known as a "burglar
alarm "—the patentee of which invention appears
to be the solitary person who, in this tragedy, ex-
emplifies the proverb concerning an ill wind. About
three a.m. on the 14th of December Mr. Van Brunt
and Mr. Albert Van Brunt were awakened by the
ringing of the alarm bell. Arming themselves and a
farm labourer named Scott, they hastened to Judge
Van Brunt's house. As two burglars tried to escape
from it one was shot dead, the other was mortally
wounded. The dead man proved to be William
Mosier; the other—who lived only long enough to de-
clare that he knew not where the child was—was
Joseph Clark. Walter Ross saw the bodies at the
Brooklyn Morge. He at once identified Clark as the
man who had driven the chaise. His identification
of Mosier seems to have been less instant; but, con-
firmed by the evidence of a gardener who had seen
the men together at Germantown, it is considered to
have been conclusive.

The fear now is that the place of Charles Ross's
concealment—which Mosier had never revealed even
to Clark—is known only to accomplices whom no
promise of personal impunity or reward will re-assure
in the face of the popular excitement. Clearly the
best hope is that, when this excitement has subsided,
the reward will induce the restoration of the child,
who is known to have been alive on December 12; and
now that the principal, perhaps the only, criminals
have paid the penalty, it becomes the duty of
the public to the bereaved family to abstain
from any threatening tone towards the present
harbourers of the child which might delay or
frustrate that hope. This consideration is the
more due to the parents, because they have bravely
acquiesced in a policy necessary for the protection of
society, and have proved that public spirit is capable
of sustaining, under sufferings of which no cynicism
will question the zeality, a creditable resistance to
levying of black-mail. Nor will they receive less sym-
pathy because their sufferings has been aggravated by
the conduct—conduct whix..h we should prefer not to
characterise here—of certain "sensational" news-
papers in America—journals which, when they shed
drops of gall, are not the more attractive because they
would, with similar motives, be equally feady to weep
equally honest tears of joy.

PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON SOME 1
ACOUSTICAL PROBLEMS. I
The.present series of Friday evening lectures at the
Royal Institution in London, was commenced, on
Friday in last week, by an able address by
Professor ' Tyndall on "Some Acoustical pro-
blems," which was illustrated by some delicate
and admirable experiments. The lecture was to a
great extent a continuation of one delivered by him
last year on the important investigations made for the
Trinity House in respect to fog-signals, and the dis-
tances at which sounds from guns, gongs, whistles,
steam-engines, and other instruments could be heard
under different atmospheric conditions. In it he
followed out the same plan of realising mental
images through the medium of physical bases in
the form of visible actions. In the first place
he showed, by means of the electric light
and the shadows thrown on it by the screen, the flow
of heavy carbonic acid gas from a glass jar, the
motions of a jet of sulphuric ether blown from a glass
tube, and the heated currents of air generated by the
combustion of an ordinary candle in this way demon-
strating the nature of the reflecting surfaces of acous-
tic clouds present invisibly in the atmosphere. In refe-
rence to the heavy carbonic acid gas he stated that the
wave of sDund transmitted through it would be reduced
in velocity from 1,120 feet per second to about 900 feet,
and that after passing it and proceeding again through
the atmosphere it would re-attain its original velocity,
although at every such change of velocity a part of the
wave motion would be reflected, and this act of
reflection might be repeated so eften as to
ultimately waste the entire wave of sound. Last
year he had tried to make evident the effect of alter-
nate vapour clouds in the air by a large series of layers
of carbonic acid and hydrogen gases, by means of a
large apparatus giving twenty-five layers of the one
alternating with the like number of layers of theother,
but on the present occasion the like effects were made
evident in the oscillations of a sensitive flame by a
much more compact and handy apparatus, constructed
by Mr. Tisley, in which seven layers proved amply
effective. By the use of a musical reed and sensitive
gas flames some very beautiful illustrations of the re-
flection and transmission of sounds were given, glass
plates, the hand, and the heated air-current surround-
ing an ordinary batswing gas-burner turning back
the sounds and preserving the gas flames from twitter-
ing, as they would do to the notes of the musical
reed when the sounds from it travelled direct, or
through the interposition of woven or air-containing
substances, such as a folded cambric handkerchief,
muslin pads, felt half-an-inch thick, and so forth. It
was also shown that a large glass plate placed near
the musical reed reflected the sound, whilst the gas
jet was energetically affected by the sound-waves
passing round and falling in behind the glass when the
screen was placed near the " hearing " object. Finally
the lecturer referred to two extraordinary examples
of the transmission of sound, one in the Trinity
House investigations on the 17th October, when the
guns and syrens at Dover Castle were heard for
a distance of 18 miles- and the other of the differences
in the sound of guns fired in the Paris districts, the
reports of the guns fired at Montlhery coming up sharp
and clear to auditors at Villejuif, whilst, on the con-
trary, the reports of guns fired at Villejuif were audible
at Montlhery as rumbling sounds, the "rumbling"
being due to the numerous reflections produced by the
smoke laden clouds emanating from the city of Paris.
The time periods of the sound-echoes it was contended
were measures of the depths of atmosphere from which
the reflections were transmitted.

The noble theatre of the inatitution was densely
crowded, and in the library, which was promenaded
after the discourse, there were displayed many
novelties in acoustical apparatus, as well as some
charming objects of art and pictures.

I the journals also have become sensational over ifue
future of a country where the young men are snb-
jected to the degradation of corporal punishment. If
the measure passes, however, the probabilities are
that birching for " larrikinism " will be found as
effectual as flogging for garrotting, and that the
exuberance of the youth of the colony will find vent
in other directions. The over-fed, hulking youngsters
seem to dread being whipped like boys, and would,
seemingly, prefer to be lashed with the cat like men.