MAGAZINE EXTRACTS.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 18, Issue 31, 16 April 1907, Page 6

MAGAZINE EXTRACTS.

A German chemist has discovered that, by boiling sawdust with hydrochloric acid, grape sugar is formed, The liquor is ferii.emcd and then distilled. From gewts, oi sawdust about 6 gallons of proof spirits were obtained.

Apples all the Year RouND.-This ini it, says a Home contemporary, is to be found on sale in English shops all the year I'ound. And the reason is easily given. No fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand cases of apples have been shipped to the Thames from Tasmania, at the other side of the world, where their summer is our winter. '1 bis, too, is in addition to a very large quantity that arrived in London from New Zealand and Sydney. With the surplus irom our own orchards, and those from gardens in other countries, apples will scarcely ever be out of season. And it is well, for vegetarians declare that apples and bread yield all that is required for human sustenanoe.

The Lord of Burghley.—Julia Cartwright, in the Magazine of Art, tells the story of the romantic marriage of the Lord of Burghley, the subject of Tennyson's famous poem. "In the year 1791, Henry Cecil, then a man of seven or eight and thirty, nephew and heir of 'che Earl of Exeter, and Lord Burghley cf those days, came to live in the quiet village of Bolas, on the banks of the River Teru, in a remote corner of Shropshire. Whila young he had been led into a marriage which had proved unhappy, and when he came to Shropshire had recently divorced his wife. In a melancholy mood, he resolved to hide himself from the world, and, concealing his birth and rank, heassumed the name of Jones and the profession of a {ravelling artist, and lodged during some months in the house of .1 farmer named Thomas Hoggins. Here he fell in love with the farmer's fair young daughter, Sarah, and, with her parents' consent, made her his wife. The .names of the contracting parties may still be read in the parish register of the Shropshire village, where the wedding took place on the 3rd October, 1791. Upon his uncle's death, a year afterwrds, Mr. Cecil succeeded to the earldom: and, without telling his secret, he brought his bride home to Burghley, where she learnt it for the first time."

A Rival to the Bagpipes.—Perhaps the most peculiar of Turkish musical instruments is that known as Mohammed's Standard, which consists of a brass frame with numerous bells, on the top of a long pole surmounted by the crescent and streamers of horse-hair. It figures in Janissary or military bands, in concert with various ,- drums great and small, trumpets, horns, and cymbals, which produce noise enough to put any foe to flight. That such a triumph has been obtained by our own beloved national music (remarks C. F. Gordon Cumming in Blaekvood) we are all aware, for is it not recorded in one of our favourite historic ballads how I The Esk was swollen sae red and sae deep, But shouther to shouther the brave lads keep; Twa thousand swam ower to fell English ground, An' danced themselves dry to the pibroch's sound. Dumfounder'd the English saw, they saw— Dumfounder'd they heard the blaw, the blaw; Dumfounder'd they a' ran awa\ awa\ From the hundred pipers an' a l , an' a'. I am quite sure that no Southron will for a moment question the veracity of this incident ! Even a single stand, of pipes has done right good service in putting to flight the mort savage of foes, as when, in the Peninsular war, a solitary piper somehow found limself separated from his regiment, and in mminent peril from a whole pack of hungry wolves. With the calmness of desperation he blew up his chanter, and what was his joy when, at the first skirl of the pipes, the whole pack turned tail and fled!

Captured BRiDES.—Traces of the primitive custom of capture, says a writer in an old number of Blackwood, are observable in the marriages of the Miao tribes in South-Western China, The women of one tribe, without waiting for the attack, simulated or otherwise, of their wooers, go through the wedding ceremonies, such as they are, with dishevelled hair and naked feet. Other branches of the same people dispense with every form of marriage rite. With the return of each spring the marriageable lads and lasses erect a " devil’s staff," or May-pole, decked withribbons and flowers, and dance around it to the tune of the men's castanets. Choice is made by the young men of the particular maids who lake their fancy, and, if these reciprocate the admiration of their wooers, the pair stray off to the neighbouring hills and valleys for the enjoyment of a short honeymoon, after which the husbands seek out their brides’ parents, and agree as to the amount in kind which they shall pay them as compensation for the loss of their daughters.- Among other clans the young people repair to the hillsides in the " leaping month," and play at catch with coloured balls adorned with long strings. The act of tying two balls together, with the consent of the owners of both, is considered a sufficient preliminary for the same kind of alfresco marriage as that just described. In the province of Kwang-se a kind of official sanction is given to those spontaneous alliances. The young men and women of the neighbouring aboriginal tribes assemble on -a given day in the courtyards of the prefects’, yamuns, and seat themselves on the ground, the men on one side of the yards and the women on the other. As his inclination suggests, each young man crosses over and seats himself by the lady of his choice, He then, in the words of the Chinese historian, "breathesinto hermouth": and if this attention is. accepted in good part, the couple pair off without more ado. The act thus described is probably that of kissing; but as that form of salutation is entirely unknown among the Chinese, the historian is driven to describe it by a circumlocution, In the province of Yunnan the native tribes have adopted much of the Chinese ceremonial, though they still preserve some of their peculiar customs. By these people much virtue is held to be in the bath taken by the bride on her wedding morning, and in the unctuous anointment of her whole body with rose-malocs which succeeds the ablution. But among the Kakhyens on the Burmese frontier, the relics of capture become again conspicuous, W hen the day which is to make a Kakhyen young man and maiden one arrives, “ five voting men and girls set out from the bridegroom’s village to that of the bride, where they wait till nightfall in a neighbouring house. At dusk thebrideis brought thither hv one of the stranger girls, as it were, without the knowledge of her parents, and told that these men have come to claim her. They all set out at once for the bridegroom’s village. In the morning: the bride is placed under a close canopy outside the bridei,icorn’s house. Presently there arrives a paiiy of young men from her village, to b .arch, as they say. for one. of their- girls •.'.ho has been stolen. They are inyifed to icuk under the canopy, and bidden, if they 11, to take the girl away; but they reply, ■ ’i is well; let her remain where she's.'" i is practice is identical with the custom v.lnch prevailed among the Maoris of New Zealand before they learned fromourcountrymcn that there were other and more civilised ,va)3 ot entering the statu of matrimony.