SCIENTIFIC GOSSIP.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2992, 27 January 1881, Page 4

SCIENTIFIC GOSSIP.

M. Emile Jeannin, a French sculptor, claims to have discovered that celluloid is admirably adapted for stereotyping. The process takes only half an hour ; and while galvano-plastic will only give 30,000 good impressions, celluloid will give 50,000, the plates being, moreover, very light and flexible, and applicable to cylindrical machines of high speed.

Dr W. H. Gregg, of New fork, has produced with camphor a dyeing substance of great value. The only colour that he has obtained up to the present is yellow in all its shades, but he hopes to be able to produce scarlet or carmine, The principle feature of" this dye, besides its novelty, is its great brilliuncy and solidity. The boiling for several hours of a tissue with this colour in a strong soapy water has no other effect than the changing of the shade a little.

The forthcoming number of the Geographisch Mittheilungen contains Dr Regel's account of a trip from Kuldja to Turfan, in Chinese Turkestan, which no European travellers appears to have visited since Father Goes did so in the seventeeth century. The new town consists of two fortrestes, inhabited by several thousand Tarantchis, Dungans and Chinese. It lies in the midst of the desert, its fields being irrigated by water conveyed through under ground canals from the foot of the Thianshan.

A natural ice-house is one of the curiosities of Northern New Jersey. It lies behind Blue Mountain. The ice gorge is several hundred yards in extent, ten to thirty feet deep, with caves and clifts in the rocks where the ice lies. The shade at the gorge is very dense, the sun apparently never penetrating it. The bottom of the gorge and the little caves and crevices are filled with ice. The themometer, which registered the nineties at Newton, marked 35 at the bottom of this gorge. A few feet from one end a spring of tho most delicious sparkling water bubbles up. The water in this spring stands at 34.

In the earlies part of the last century there lived in Scotlaud a Colonel Townsend, who could apparently die whenever he chose, and come to life at wiJl. His frame would become rigid and cold, his eyes dull and ghastly, and his features shrunk and waxy as in death. In this state he ■would remain for several hours, and then

would slowly revive. He once performed this strange experiment in the presence of three physicians, who, perceiving no pulsation of the heart and no respiration, oonvinced themselves that ho was really dead. But soon after they left him, he revived. It has beeu asserted that he died actually while repeating the ghastly performance.