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Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 16, Issue 814, 18 August 1870, Page 3

The Sydney papers express their belief that the shocks of earthquake recently felt in New South Wales were connected with, the Tongariro eruption.

The Chinese.— The influx of Chinese with which we are threatened (says thu Dunedin Evening Star) can be accounted for by the fact that Chinese immigration to America has been stopped by legislation. At San Francisco, Chinese labor has al« most superseded white labor, and *hey have now beer, warned not to go there, and lmvo been recommended to try Australia and New Zealand. Nearly all the hands jn the Alta»Califomia printing-office are Chinese. Their labor costs about one-third of that of whites.

Ma Webb's Addee.—Mr C. H. Webb, a,celebrated American journalist, has int vented a machine called the "Adder," Arithmetical, not Zoological. This wonderful invention for adding figures by machinery is very simple, and is not likely to get out of order; it has been an inimense success in America, and has already found its way to the colonies. We (Wa* nganui Evening Herald) have beeu informed by Mr Walter Simpson that there are some in Wellington, and we are indebted to him for a copy of testimonials from the American press and eminent gentlemen of that continent. We give the following from the New York Evening Post:-The "Adder" which Mr C. H. Webb has ingeniously contrived is not a snake, but a useful and very curious invention to assist accountants and others in adding up long columns of figures. Iu simplicity of mechanism, convenience of form, and the ease with which it can be worked without any previous practice and almost without instruction, it possesses considerable merit. The "Adder" is a fiat disc, four by six inches in surface measurement, and not thicker than a common memorandum book. On the silver face-plate numerals are arranged in regular order from oto 99. There is an inner wheel drilled with corresponding holes. Suppose you have 75, 95, and 50 to add together. Seize your wheel with your pencil point at the holes standing by those numbers, three quick turns, until the motion of the pencil is arrested by soma mysterious stop which you do not have to consider or provide for at all, and lo! you have the sum of those numbers landed in a little pigeon hole cut in the face-plate. Suppose you hare 999 showing in the stop, .Now if you add 1 to it, by moving the wheel a fraction of an inch, and presto, away fly the nines and the figure 1,0l)0 appears. A mistake is impossible. To aril intents and purposes you collar the sum of the numbers to be added aud drag it up to the rack, where you can contemplate it at leisure. Of course if you seize the wrong number your account turns out wroug, but still the addition is correct, aud the man who would select a 35 when iSS was the number before him, could not be trusted in any event, inasmuch as he would be quite as likely to write down % and 3 as making 5.