Morning journal and courier., 1881-11-22
Foes of the Telegraph.

How BuRalOs, Bears, Monkeys. Ele- plants. Worms and Spiders Destroy the Wires.
 TFrom Youth and Pleasure.1
 If you will kick pound on a telegraph | pole or place your ear against one on a windy l day, what will the noise remind you of? A hive of bees? Precisely. So it does the bears | in Norway. Bears are passionately fond of honey, and when in one of the wild districts Bru1n hears the humming of the wires he I follows the sound to the post where it is 1 loudest and begins to tear away the stones. heaped round the poles in rocky soil to steady them, in order to get at the hive which he imagines to be there. In his dis appointment and disgust he usually leaves | savage marks of his claws in the wood Nor | is he the only victim of the wires. In the electric exhibition at Paris they show the top of thick pine telegraph post through which 8 woodpecker has drilled a hole several
 inches in diameter The bird had apparent. ly perched on the pole and taken the hum
 ming of the wires for the buzzing of nest of
 insects in the wood, and had set himself man.
 fully-or birdfully-to dig them out Wolves
 will not stay in Norway where telegraph
 line has been built. It was formerly the
 custom to protect farms by planting poles round them strung with cards, something
 like rabbit snares. and gradually the wolves
 came to respect these precautions, so that
 line stretched across the neck of peninsula would protect the whole O1SLrlcC. The wolves
 take the telegraph for new and improved
 snare, and promptly leave the country when
 a line is built. On our own treeless
 plains the buffalo halls the telegraph pole as an ingenious contrivance for his own benefit.
 Like all cattle, he delights in scratching him.
 self, and he goes through the performance so
 energetically that he knocks down the post.
 An early builder of telegraph lines under
 took to protect the posts by inserting brad
 avis into the wood, but the thick skinned
 buffalo found the brad-awI an improvement,
 as affording him 8 new sensation, and
 scratched down more poles than ever. In
 Sumatra the elephants systematically op-
 posed to telegraph lines and at least twenty
 times year make raids on them In May,
 1876, the elephants tore down the poles for
 several furlongs and hid the wires and insu-
 lators in the cane jungle. and for three nights
 in succession they repeated the performance
 as regularly as the repairers rebuilt the line during the day. The monkeys and apes are about as formidable enemies, as they use the wires for swings and trapezes and carry off the glass ihsulators as valuable prizes; then when the repairer goes to correct the mis- chief, he may be bounced upon by tiger or driven up the post by mad buffalo. In Japan the special enemies of the telegraph are the spiders, which grow to an immense size and avail themselves of the wires ex- cellent frameworks for their webs. So thick are the cords the Japanese spiders spin that often, especially when they are covered with dew, they serve to connect the wires with each other or the ground, and so to stop them from working In the sea the wires are not any safer, as a small worm has developed itself since cables came into fashion which bores it's way through iron wire and gutta- -percha, lets in the water and so destroys line worth mill lions of dollars When great storm comes on in the center of the ocean and the cable breaks while it is being laid or threatens to break, no one is alarmed. They fasten the cable to & buoy and come back afterwards and pick it up, or if it is at the bottom of the sea they drop dredge with a mile or SO of rope and fish out the precious thread, as large as one of your fingers, almost as easily as you would fish up 8 penny from the bottom of tub of water with the tones. But the little worm no bigger than needle is more formidable than the elephant on shore or the hurricane at sea-
 In making up his forms the foreman of Montreal paper mixed an article on Roman Catholic missions in Africa with a recipe for making tomato catsup. As published the article reads "The Roman Catholics claim to be making material advances in Africa. During the past three ye,rs they have ob- tained firm footing in the interior of the continent. and have sent forth several mis- sionaries into the equatorial regions They are accustomed to begin heir work by buy ing heathen children and educating them The easiest and best way to prepare them is to first wipe them with a clean towel; then place them in dripping pans and bake them until they are tender. Then you will have no difficulty in rubbing them through sieve, and will save time by not being obliged to cut them in slices and cook for several Do,aao