Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/733

Rh half of this. The pressure of the gas as it issues at the mouth of the well is nearly or quite two hundred pounds per square inch. Even at the works of the company represented by Mr. Carnegie, nine miles from the well, the pressure is seventy-five pounds per square inch. Eleven lines of pipe are conveying gas from the various wells to the manufacturing establishments in and around Pittsburg. Although it is only two years since gas has been used in Pittsburg, it has already displaced 40,000 bushels of coal per day in the mills that have used it, and about an equal amount has been displaced in the works beyond the city limits. Contracts are now made to supply houses with gas at a cost equal to that of the coal bill for the preceding year. In many houses, no other fuel than this gas is used; and everybody who has applied it to domestic purposes is delighted with the change from the smoky and dirty bituminous coal. It is, therefore, Mr. Carnegie suggests, quite within the region of probability that the city, now so black, may become so revolutionized as to be the cleanest manufacturing city in the world.

English Board-School Science.—Dr. Andrew Wilson's "Health" has been struck with some of the answers in the schoolchildren's examination-papers in popular science, and gives a few specimens of them. Among them are—"the humerus (or upper arm-bone) is known as the 'numerous,' and is often called 'the funny-bone.'" "The sweet-bread is otherwise called the paneras (for pancreas), which is so named from the Midland Railway Station in London." "A thermometer is an instrument used to let out the heat when it is going to be cold." "When roasting a piece of beef, put it in front of a brisk fire, so as to congratulate the outside." "Sugar is an amyloid. If you were to eat much sugar and nothing else, you would not live, because sugar has not got no carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Potatoes is another amyloids." Very interesting is the description of digestion given by one of the pupils: "Food is digested by the action of the lungs; digestion is brought on by the lungs having something the matter with them. The food then passes through your windpipe into the pores, and thus passes off you by evaporation, through a lot of little holes in your skin called capillaries. The food is nourished in the stomach. If you were to eat anything hard you would not be able to digest it, and the consequence would be you would have indigestion. The gall-bladder throws off juice from the food which passes through it. We call the kidneys the bread-basket, because it is where all the bread goes to. They lay concealed up by the heart."

A Story of Two Rats.—A correspondent of "Land and Water" tells a story of two white rats which he had adopted as pets. The male was a quiet, commonplace sort of rat, acquaintance with whom afforded few incidents of particular interest. The female was a great coquette, and a regular domestic tyrant, exercising absolute control of her spouse and household. Always pleased with the gift of some dainty, she was "rapturously delighted" if allowed to think she had stolen it. If the master would have a piece of sugar on the table, she would creep up and take it, retreating behind a book to devour it, as she hoped, unobserved. She was a relentless enemy to mice; and, when one of these animals was put into her cage, "she flew at it and slew it with a single bite, leaving it instantly, as a well-trained terrier does the rat it has killed." The first occasion of Anna Maria having little ones was quite an event. "When I went to the box, as usual, to give my little rodents a scrap of whatever I might have had, I found Augustus (the male) sitting out in the cold and looking terribly sheepish. On opening the sleeping compartment, there was Anna Maria, with something like a smile upon her shrewish little countenance, keeping watch and ward over nine ridiculously naked little offspring. On these occasions Augustus was completely effaced. He shirked the slightest responsibility; and I always had to make him up a separate bed, for sleep with his children he would not. If by chance he was forced to walk among them, he did so with an anxiety that would have done credit to an elephant stepping between eggs. As they grew up, assumed hair, and began to run about, he would allow them to take liberties with him, and even rob him of tidbits." The master