The Opelousas courier., 1891-01-10
SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL.

A mill at Alpens, Mich, makes good
manila paper from pulp of tamarack.
An Iowa court has decided that a
meteor belongs to the person on whose
lsnd it falls.
Montana claims to have the largest and
dnest Jasper quarries in the world, re-
Gently discovered.
Anew gun has been perfected by signor
Guidolli, of Lucca, which will fire sixty
four shots a minute.
For every fifteen yards we descend into
she earth the temperature increases about
ssn degrees Fahrenheit.
The fastest ship in the French navy
cow has a speed of 1853 knots per
ssour without engine strain.
An Italian savant claims that in
sscting a current of electricity through
silk delays its souring for several days.
A new system of ventilation, never be-
fore used on ocean steamships, is to be a
factor of the two new vessels now being
| constructed for the transatlantic service
| of the Cunard Line.
A rich bed of coal has been discovered
in the Russian Amoor province of Siberia,
on Usuri River. The quality of the de-
post is said to be equal to that OF the
best English product.
1t is the opinion of noted specialists on
diseases of the nose, throat and lungs
that one baby in every three has a growth
in the nose that obstructs respiration. 1t
is due to covering up the head.
One of the steel saws at the Washing
ton Gun Foundry recently cut through a
| piece of gun carriage metal four inches
in width by five inches in thickness in
| twenty minutes. The saw in OF English
make.
Two chemists are experimenting at
Freeport, Penn, with the view of pro.
ducing carbon points for electric lighting
from natural gas. 1t is said that by
burning the gas in a specially prepared
| furnace pure carbon is obtained, but as
yet at a cost too great for practical pur-
poses.
A twenty two.inch iron pipe which
was recently exhumed after being buried
in the earth for fourteen years, at Lsssen,
CAL, came out as good as new. The
pipe was coated with ~asphaltum when it
was nut into the ground. This may be
taken as a good test of the preserVatlve
virtues of asphaltum.
An old sea captains argument is re-
called at the completion of the race be-
tween the steamships City of New York
| and Teutonic.t His was the view that
the City of New York would wiu the
eastward passage and the Teutonic the
| westward, because the vessels are evenly
matched, and one is better adapted to
| English and the other to American
| Goals.
The Buffalo IN. " fire department
has lately received a novel fire engine
which has excited much interest in that
city. The carriage is constructed en-
tirely of papier mache, all the different
parts of the body, wheels, poles and the
rest being finished in the best possible
manner. While the durability and
powers Of resistance possessed by this
material are fully as great as those of
wood the weight is, of course, much
less.
A new machine has been designed for
the excavation of sewer trenches. The
material in this system of excavation is
handled but once, and the operation is
continuous, a line of loaded buckets
passing out and a line of empty ones re-
turning to be filled at the same time.
Ordinary ~excavating machines require
| the empty buckets to be returned over
| the same line over which the. full ones
are sent out, and it is claimed that for
this reason the new machine can work
more rapidly and cheaply.
The six-inch ordnance rifle which sue
ceeded in demolishing the British armor
plate at Annapolis is capable of hurting o
proiectile through 103 inches of wrought
iron placed 1000 yards from the muzzle
Of the gun. The power of the eight
inch gun is 16 $40 inches, same dis
lance, and of the ten-inch gun twenty
one inches, same distance. The twelve
inch projectile will pierce twenty eight
inches at a distance Of 5000 yards. The
th~irteen-inch guns, which will be pro-
vided for the battle ships, are capable o.
demolishing the heaviest armor.