Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/150

140 The laborers in the refinery, who have to work half naked, and whose skin is soiled with molasses, suffer greatly from them, so much that operations have to be suspended at times. Children in the schools near the bee-stands are frequently stung, and horses passing in the neighborhood are in constant danger. M. Delpech maintains that bees are in reality much more dangerous than is generally believed. He makes a triple classification of the accidents that may arise from the wounds they inflict: 1. Trifling accidents, with heat and swelling, followed by a feeling of oppression and itching; 2. More serious accidents, which are cured, beginning with the same symptoms as the former, followed by great weakness, precordial anxiety, cold in the extremities, nausea, insupportable headache, often by nettle-rash, and sometimes by convulsive and tetanic symptoms; 3. Accidents resulting in death, which often speedily follows stings in the face, head, neck, etc. The fatal termination is preceded by two kinds of symptoms—those resulting from local lesions, the exceptional gravity of which is due to the seat of the injury, as where a swelling in the throat is produced resulting in asphyxia; and those in which the toxic action of the poison introduced into the circulation seems to be the immediate cause of death. In this case we have a condition of syncope and asphyxia, with signs of convulsion and tetanus. A considerable number of cases of death resulting from bee stings are cited in the report.

Ancient House Sanitation.—Dr. W. H. Corfield reviewed the "History of House Sanitation" in an address which he recently delivered, as president, before the English Society of Medical Officers of Health. The necessity of removing surplus rain-water for preventing dampness in the soil of residences has been recognized from the most ancient times, and found emphatic expression in Rome twenty-five hundred years ago, when a grand drainage system for the city, a part of which is still in operation, was constructed by Tarquin the Elder; and the main drain of his work, "The Cloaca Maxima," is styled by Dr. Corfield "the great pattern of all drains." The device for deodorizing excrement by mixing it with dry earth is at least as old as the time of Moses. According to Livy, the Cloaca Maxima was used also to carry away the filth of the city; and, according to Mr. Baldwin Latham, the water-closet is a very ancient device, the use of which "has been traced to all nations that had arrived at a certain degree of refinement." They were probably of Asiatic origin. They were introduced into Rome during the republic; and remains of them have been found in the Palace of the Cæsars at Rome, and in the ruins of Pompeii.

A New Prospective Source of Heat.—Mr. J. Starkie Gardner has published a paper on the utilization of the underground heat of the earth. He holds that the crust of the earth is thin, and that its movements are more compatible with a thickness of ten than of fifty miles. The deepest artesian well in the world is being bored at Pesth, Hungary, with the object of securing an unlimited supply of warm water for the city baths, and has already reached a depth of more than three thousand feet. The present temperature of the water is 161° Fahr., and the borings will be prosecuted till water of 178° is obtained. "It needs no seer," says Mr. Gardner, "to pierce the not distant future when we shall be driven to every expedient to discover modes of obtaining heat without the consumption of fuel, and the perhaps far more remote future when we shall bore shafts down to the liquid layer, and conduct our smelting operations at the pit's mouth."

Bacteria under High Pressure.—M. A. Certes has reported on experiments which he has made on the decomposition of organic matter under high pressure, with the purpose of ascertaining whether the process takes place in the depths of the sea in the same manner as in the open air. He found that bacteria thrive and increase under pressures of from three hundred to six hundred atmospheres, almost as in a normal temperature, except that the microbes are different and the results of their action have only a feeble instead of a strong odor, and are acid instead of alkaline in their reaction. M. Certes will continue his experiments in the winter at the normal temperature of the sea depths, or 39°.