Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/738

718 sewers of Paris, or the underground avenues, that might be made by connecting the sidewalk vaults of New York, seems to be an indispensable prerequisite to any practicable general location of electric telegraphic and other wires under the ground. Nevertheless, the overhead electric-light wires are a nuisance, and fitly entitled to the epithet, "a Damocletian terror," which the London "Lancet" applies to them.

Food-Value of "Whole-Wheat" Flour.—Dr. Campbell Morfitt, who has been largely instrumental in introducing improved forms of bread and new methods of bread-making, has reported an experiment he has made to ascertain the relative value of common flour and of his "whole-wheat" flour. The objections to the old Graham flour, that its coarse bran was irritating to the digestive organs, were well founded. The "whole-wheat" flour is free from this fault, for the bran is not coarse or sharp-edged. Dr. Morfitt makes three kinds of flour: the crude, representing the entire grain; a standard refined granular meal, representing ninety-three or ninety-four per cent of the cleaned grain; and a pearl-white meal representing all the farina of the grain with some cerealine, about eighty-three per cent of the whole. Given weights of each of these were carefully brushed over a fine wire-cloth till all the farinaceous portions had gone through. That which was left on the sieve—called proximate bran—amounted, in the mean, to 18·28 per cent of the crude, and 12·19 per cent of the standard meal. Therefore, wheat may be said, generally, to consist of 81·72 per cent farina and 18·28 of branny matter. The proximate brans were next inclosed in fine cloths and kneaded under relays of cool water till the latter ceased to become cloudy, and by this treatment were reduced in weight rather more than one half. The residue left from this treatment was called absolute bran. It exists in a fixed ratio to the meal in all the wheats indifferently of 9·65 per cent from the crude, and 5·80 per cent from the standard meal. Thus, the total of actual bran in any wheat does not exceed ten per cent. The proximate bran was then subjected to an artificial digestive process, to discover how much more of its substance it would yield in that way. The quantity of "ultimate" bran left after this experiment was reduced by 18·44 per cent, or to 7·87 per cent for the crude meals, and by 21·88 per cent, or to 4·56 per cent for the standard meals. The more powerful natural digestion of the stomach must certainly extract still more from the meals. "Results could not be more impressive than these," says Dr. Morfitt, "as to the superior nourishing value of whole-wheat meal, for they prove that the separation and rejection of the bran must inevitably impoverish the residual farina of the flour."

Poisonous and Medicinal Herbs in India.—No country is better supplied with medicinal as well as poisonous herbs than India. The waysides and ditches abound in plants that possess some strange, and some the most deadly qualities. One of the most common of these plants is the datoora, with its large white flower, and leaves resembling those of the hollyhock. It is well known as a remedy for asthma, and its leaves are used in the shape of cigars or "tobacco," but its seeds are a subtile and powerful poison, in small quantities causing temporary insanity, and in large either permanent injury to the brain or death. The natives believe that it is used by robbers to aid them in their operations. The madār grows from two to four feet high in isolated groups along road-sides and in open, sunny places. It is soft and branching, with broad, thick, dark-green leaves covered with down, and large white waxen flowers tinged with pink toward the center. The application of the leaf is a sovereign remedy for sprains, swellings, and pains. The strangest and most powerful property of the madār resides in the milk, which exudes abundantly on the slightest scratch of its succulent leaf or stem. The natives profess to use it for any obstinate sore, especially in the nostril, but when swallowed it produces spasms of hilarious intoxication of which the patient recollects nothing after they are over. The natives say that if a probe is formed from a mixture of the madār-milk with a pounded ruttee-seed, dried and hardened in the sun, and if the skin is pricked with this and the point left, death will follow imperceptibly and painlessly in two or three days, leaving no trace of the cause but the faintest speck