The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1902-03-22
SCIENTIFIC NOTES.

In his ten years of experiment at
Paris and Lille, DR.. Calmette has made
his anti-venomous serum an effective
remedy for snake bites when inject
ed within four or five hours; and it
is supplied to such countries as
India, Australia and tropical South
America, where the victims number
tens of thousands yearly. The prepara-
ton of this antidote requires the ven
ON of serpents. Cobras and others
are kept alive in a special dollhouse.
and once a fortnight the doctor and
his assistant extract the venom from
each by holding it's head in the hands
and COMPRISING the poison glands.
The snake, which seldom eats IN cap
tivity, is then forcibly fed by pouring
two or three raw eggs through glass
funnel into the stomach. The poison,
dried for keeping, is used in solution
for inoculating horses or dogs. and at
the end of sixteen months a horse is
made capable of receiving safely a
dose that would kill 200 unvaccinated
horses. From each horse may then be
taken every two or three weeks, from
six TO eight quarts of blood, containing !.
two or three quarts of active serum.
The serum is bottled in single doses
about a third of an ounce.
Artificial hair has been a difficult
material to make. Cocoanut and agaye
fibers have been much used for stuffing
furniture, and chemical treatment is
claimed to make them impervious to
wet, odorless, elastic, unreliable and
unbreakable. But their short length
limits their use in fabrics The sue
cess of silk from celluloSe has led some
manufacturers at Frankfort-on-th the
Main to make further trials with the
same substance, and they seem to
have produced not only a very salts
factory imitation horse hair, but q
very good substitute for human hair
for wigs. Brittleness of the cellulose,
the troublesome difficulty was over
come by spinning several threads to-
gether
Air soundings of the last few years
have given very unexpected tempera-
ture results. The upper air is colder
than was supposed, the average being
about thirteen degrees below zero
Fahrenheit a 10000 feet and thirty
five degrees below at %, 600 feet; and
the decrease of temperat ure gains in
rate instead of becoming slower as the
altitude increases. The fall of three
per cent for each 1000 feet in the low
er strata becomes nearly twice as much
at the greatest height reached. The
influence of seasons at high attitudes
is surprisingly great, and at 80. 600 feet
the average March temperature Is
about sixty-five below zero while that
of August is only forty-four degrees
below.
Carbolic- acid as dressing for
seems to be attended by risk
little understood. DR.. j. @. Sheldon
reports a recent amputatio of the leg
made necessary by spilling weak car
bolic solution on the foot, and Mas
sachusetts physician some years ago
found records of more than 100 cases
of sangrene due TO free use of car
bolic acid much diluted for slight
wounds and bruises.
The water kite of Sjostrand.
swedish inventor. is a novel shoal-wa-
ter indicator, consisting of an aluml-
mum plate. held by two wires, and so
by weights as to swim be-
meath the vessel at a practically UNI
form depth with speeds of five TO M
teen knots If an obtacle is struck
one wire is detached, causing an alarm
bell to ring.
a long and vigorous breath at ire
4uent intervals is the preventive Oh
that Prof. Heinz, OF Ell
ingen, regards as infallible as Simple j
The explanation is that the extra OK
gen added to the blood lessons the sen
sitiveness Of the lobe of the brain thSI
sea sickness by reactipg Oh