MISCELLANEOUS.

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 344, 28 July 1874, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

Roasted coffee, says The Homeopathic World, is one of the most powerful means, not only of rendering animal and regetable effluvia innoxious, but of actually destroying thorn. In proof of this, the statement is made that a room in which meat, in an advanced degree of decomposition, had been kept for tome time, was instantly deprivod of all smell on an open coffee-roaster being carried through it containing lib of newly roasted coffee ; and in another room, the effluvia occasioned by the clearing out of a cesspool, so that sulphuret of hydrogen and ammonia could be clearly detected, was entirely removed within half a minute on the employment of 3ozs of fresh coffee. The best mode is to dry the raw bean, pound it in a mortar, and then roast the powder on a moderately heated iron plate until it assumes a dark brown hue ; it is in this state ready for use. Dr Kiister and Professor Bosch, of Bonn, havo made, the Broad Arrow asserts, a series of experiments with hard and soft bullets upon the bodies of animals at the Royal Military School in Spandau, with the view of determining their relati\e destructive character, the difference, if any, produced by a bullet on a dead and living body, and a number of other questions. Their experiments have settled several important points. They find that bullets act precisely the same on the dead as on the living body, so that medical text books will have to be corrected upon that point. The bullet, if composed of lead and tin, makes a clean wound, and not so large an aperture of exit as one entirely of lead. The soft lead bullet was found to act in very much the same manner as an explosive shell. Heated lead loses its power of cohesion, and soft bullets, warmed by impact on the bones of the body, divide into fragments, leaving the smaller particles in the recesses of the wound. This is distinctly seen when the bullet is fired at short ranges, and the wounds it makes are frightful. Not more than half of the bullet passed through th« bodies of the animals so experimented upon. Thus Dr Kusier is able to explain the alleged use of explosive bullets in some of the French armies. They were composed of soft lead, and splashed in the wounds they made. An experiment with a common candle yields similar results.