Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/780

760 he receives convey appalling intelligence. "Fancy," says he, "a tract of country larger than thirteen Switzerlands a prey to want that it is wellnigh impossible to relieve. The people's faces are black with hunger; they are dying by thousands upon thousands. Women and girls and boys are openly offered for sale; when I left the country, a respectable married woman could be easily bought for six dollars, and a little girl for two. In cases where it was found impossible to dispose of their children, parents have been known to kill them, sooner than witness their prolonged sufferings, in many instances throwing themselves afterward down wells, or committing suicide by arsenic. . . . The population subsisted for a long time on roots and grass; then they found some nourishment in willow-buds, and finally ate the thatches off their cottages. The bark of trees served them for several months, and last July I received specimens of the stuff the unhappy creatures had been by that time reduced to. The most harmless kind was potato-stalks, tough, stringy fibres, which only the strongest teeth could reduce to pulp. The other description was red slate-stone."

Proportion of Theine in Different Kinds of Tea.—It was some time ago asserted by Claus, as the result of his analyses of different grades of tea, that the lower the grade of tea the higher is the proportion of the alkaloid theine it contained. Thus, according to this author, the brick-tea used in Mongolia and Siberia, which is made up of all sorts of refuse, as dead leaves, stalks, and the like, contains far more theine (about 3.5 per cent.) than the higher qualities (in which the proportion found by him was from 1 to 1.3 per cent. only). Very different results have now been obtained by another chemist—Markovnikoff, of Moscow. Having made a series of analyses of one kind of tea by the various analytical methods hitherto in use, he is able to point out the deficiency of these methods. For instance, ether extracts only one-third of the whole amount of theine in a sample of tea, and benzole only one-quarter. Using, therefore, a more perfect method, and analyzing six kinds of tea—some of the very highest, others of the very lowest grades—he arrives at the result that the amount of theine in these varies very little—from 2.08 to 2.44—and that it increases regularly, with one exception, with the quality of the tea; while the amount of ash given by each kind regularly decreases from 6.1 to 5.7 per cent, from the highest to the lowest grade. These differences, however, being very small, Markovnikoff supposes that the quality of tea depends, not at all or only a very little, upon the amount of theine, and far more on the quantity of tannic acid and aromatic oils it contains; but that, on the whole, teas made from younger leaves contain more theine than those from older leaves.

Do Lightning-Rods attract?—The old dogma that a lightning-rod no more attracts electricity than an umbrella attracts rain, is not strictly exact—for, while the umbrella has no influence on the course of the descending rain-drops, it is certain that the presence of a conductor very materially changes the earthward course of the electric fluid. The Vice-President of the British Meteorological Society, Dr. R. J. Mann, in a letter to the London Times, states as follows the rationale of the action of lightning rods in protecting buildings:

Cooking.—Nothing, probably, has more direct influence over our physical and moral well-being than the preparation of the food