MISCELLANEOUS.

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 348, 6 August 1874, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

9 Iron snys a composing machine is likely to bo seen in next year's exhibition. It is an invention of Mr Hooker, a compositor ai.d self-tauglit mechanic. The machine can bo woiked singly, t^at is by one man, but the inventor says that it is most economically worked by thiee men and a boy, «ho can pioduce work equal to that of twelve compositors, he inventor has been orer ten years working out his me.iS, and has during that time twice abandoned a part completed machine for improved ones on new principles. He is now at work on a distributing machine. A writer in the Wairarapa Standard says that a good many anecdotes are related about newly arrived immigrants now-a-days. At Featuerston it is said that firewood, &c., vanishes in a mysterious manner, and of course, the poor immigrants are credited with the disappearance. At East Taieri, in Otago, the other day, an immigrant by the Asia was found in a whare beside a case which had been forced open. Around him were discovered an assortment of empty and broken flottles. Because the poor man happened to be a newly arrived immigrant he was accused of exhibiting an 1 undue partiality for liquor which did not belong to him. But what did the man say? He indignantly denied the suspicion, and related how a big dog had come suddenly into the home, broken open the case, knocked the necks off the bottles and drank the grog. The immigrant was so alarmed at the rampageous animal that he fell senseless on tie floor in the position in which he was found. The Otago police have not found the big dog yet ; but, of course, the immigrant was at once triumphantly acquitted. Colour blindness is very common in France now, and it is i|oked upon as deserving of the greatest attention in conTOxioa with the working of their railways. This disease, sometimes called Daltonism, after the propounder of the atomic theory in matter, consisted in an incapacity to judge of colour, or, more accurately, of certain colours ; and at the late congress at Lyons, Dr Favre, as chief physician of the Paris and Lyons Eailway Company, reported on the number of persons afflicted by it, and on the influence this might have on the safety of travellers. On this the engineers says : — "According to this report, among 1196 different individuals examined from IS6-4 to 1868, 13 cases of red colour blindness were found, and one of green. Again, among 728 subjects examined between 1872 and 1873, be testifies to cases of colour blindness more |or less developed. He farther estimates the number of people in France suffering from this molady at nearly 1000, and gives as the most common causes of it wounds, typhoid fever, and the like." This disease may exist in some cases, it appears, without its being known to the afflicted person, and hence the danger arising from the employment of such persons on the railway lines in any position in which they would have to do with coloured signals. Dr Favre is not able to Ipoint out any cases in which errors have been made owing to the existence of the disease, but to guard against the possibility of these, he recommends a periodical inspection of the men having chiefly to do with the signals. In superior animals, and in the mammels particularly, an injury to a nerve produces also very frequently disorderly movement!. Those phenomena have been considered as defending on something else than the irritation of the nerve ; are semi-circular canals in the ear which have been considered as having peculiar power. But I think the question is clearly decided, for in frogs we can reach the nerve ■without touching at all the semi-circular canals, and we produce those phenomena I have mentioned. It is thus certain that the nerve of audition has a power in that way to produce very disorderly movements.