SCIENTIFIC.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3068, 27 April 1881, Page 3

SCIENTIFIC.

. The term bad lands, Which is applied to a well-known region in the West, would be even more appropriate to the country in the basin of .the Herbert River, South Australia, explored last year by Mr W. H. Cornish; of the surveyor-general's department in the colony. "It fairly baffles description. Cracked ground is . a phrase hardly applicable, for there were yawing chasms from four to five feet deep, and even deeper, and eight to twelve inches wide at every few feet. It was so bad that it took the camels six hours to travel seven miles." This was slow progress, but; surpasses that attained by a party of British naval officers who landed last year on Charles Island, in the Galapagos group, near the equator, six hundred miles off the west coast of South America. The shores consist of rugged lava, and Captain A. H. Markham says : " Some idea may be gathered of the roughness of the beach when it is known that a party of explorers started to walk from the ship along the ooast to the settlement, a distance of about four miles. After abandoning the greater part of the provisions and stores with which they were laden, and having cast off all superfluous clothing, they succeeded in accomplishing tho distance in about ten hours." And even then he adds, their boots and clothes were worn through and torn to shreds, while they themselves were exhausted.

Mauna Loa, the great volcano of Hawaii, the largest of the Sandwich Islands, is again in- a state of eruption, and the flow from the crater seems likely to exceed in magnitude any heretofore known. This flow consists, not of liquid lava, but of molten rock, and moves so slowly that people can go up to the-stream and take from.it volcanic specimens, of mineral. A . letter from Hawaii, written in the latter part of November, says" the whole island was then enveloped in a dark atmosphere of smoke, rendering it difficult to see headlands _or hills distinctly more than two or three miles in any direction. The smoke arose from Ithe burning of forests through which the 'molten mass from the mountain was slowly moving. Mr W. G. A. Grant, who accompanied Mr Leigh Smith on his recent yachting expedition to the Arctic regions, lately addressed the Balloon Society in London, on the advancement of scienoe by the further exploration of the North Pole. He discussed the availability of balloons for purposes of polar discovery, and expressed the opinion that it would be impossible; for a balloon, even with the best equipment and mo3t skillful management, to make the proposed journeys of three hundred and five hundred miles through those cold and desolate regions. He approved the proposal, however,'to employ captive balloons'- from which,to. make observations. •

Mr W. Galloway, a mining expert of high authority, thinks that the recent terrible colliery explosion at Penygraig, Wales, cannot be explained as wholly due to the gas known as fire-damp. " Something else than fire-damp," he says in Nature, " something whose presence was entirely ignored, took up the flame, carried it to the innermost and to the most extreme limits of the, workings, and was, in all probability, the cause of ninety per cent, or more of the; deaths that ensued." He concludes with an, expression of his absolute conviction that this obscure agent was coal-dust. _ : ,->■ Among the more interesting discoveries made by M. Desire Charnay, in Mexico, are the remains of horses and large ruminating animals. According to M. de Q.uatrefages, the only ruminent in that country at the time of the Spanish conquest was the wild bison,' and the horse was then unknown there. That the horse may have existed in Mexico at an earlier period and become extincfcis indicated- not. only by the discovery of equine bones, but also by the miniature toy chariots found by M. Charnay. ' A substance called water-glass has lately attracted some attention in Germany and England as a means for the extinction of fires, , It appears to be an aqueous solution of silicate of soda, which was Used as a fireproof paint in Bavarian theatres fifty years ago. There, ought to be a large demand for some such substance in this country, where so many of our public buildings are in constant danger from fire.

Prom a paper by Rev. T. A. Preston, read before the Meteorological Society, it appears that the number of wasps observed in England during the year 1880 exceeded all previous experience. Lord Lindsay, the well-known astronomer, has succeeded his father as a member of the House of Peers, under the title of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.

A new rain gauge has been invented in Italy, which registers the hour and duration as well as the 'quantity of each fall of rain.