GENERAL ITEMS.

Waikato Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1515, 21 March 1882, Page 4

GENERAL ITEMS.

A female residing in the Waipawa Bush has lately sold her child for £4, *the transaction being carried out with due formality—a stamped and witnessed receipt being given to the purchaser. The man who bought the child did so with £4 out of -C 5 he received on the same day from a man to whom lie sold a dog for the latter sum. Tidings of a new explosive reach us from Austria. It is the invention of an English engineer, and is intended to re- i place gunpowder in the use of small arms. The initial velocity is said to be much greater than with gunpowder ; it does not foul or heat the barrel of the weapon, and the smoke of the discharge is almost nil.

A New Form ok Pure Wine.—A report, says Food and Health, comes from Europe of a new way of manufacturing pure wine, which has sent terror into Swiss and French wine-growers. This wine is not adulterated wine, so doctored that a clever chemist can find it out by analysis, but it is a fabricated wine, which contains all the chemical ingredients of wine, and can, therefore, not be called '' adulterated." It is said that water and raisins alone are the articles from which this wine is made. It is maintained that the chemist cannot detect the fabrication because he finds 80 per cent, water, 5 or G per cent, alcohol, and 4 or 5 per cent, tannin in sucli wine ; but the connoisseur of wines can, for these fabricated wines lack what all artificial products lack — " flavor, aroma and bouquet." Tub system of underground telegraph connections which has Ibeen adopted in Philadelphia is as follows:—The trenches, which are dug in the middle of the streets, are about 3 feet 9 inches in depth, the bottom and sides being lined with concrete. The tubes, 2 inches in diameter, are placed in these trenches, five in a row, and four rows, one above the other. A compound of pitch and slag is then poured in, until the pipes are covered, after which the top is cemented with con. crete. The trenches are finally filled with earth, which is lightly rammed down. Twenty tubes, it is said, will accommodate from 1,000 to 1,500 wires. Most of the work will be done at night. It is reported that the underground telegraph lines arc also being introduced in Chicago, and that three miles of wiie have been laid.

already The Orchestra of To-day.—The oboe resembles a clarionet very much as a rake resembles a hoe, all the difference is at one end. The voice of the oboe is very much like a man trying to whistle with liis head under water. The orchestral composers use the oboe on account of its simple, honest quality, to express a countryman going into a bank and asking the banker to lend him 200 dollars. In Jacobini's beautiful creation, " Sounds from the Kitchen," you will ranember, the oboes are used to convey the remarks that pass between the cook and the grocer's boy, who had just brought home two gallons of maple-syrup in a one-gal-lon kerosene-can. The candid astonishment of the cook infuses the soul of the listener, while the effort of the grocer's boy to explain away the apparent discrepancy between tne quantity of syrup and the size of the can, is most touchingly conveyed. The bassoon is made of wood, and the complete instrument is probably worth eight dollars a chord. It looks like a pump-log and is played by blowing into a silver stem, that winds into the side of rube. "When the bassoon is not in use it can he utilised as n clothes-prop. It has two di&tinct qualities of tone. In the upper and lower register it has a voice like a cow that has fallen into a pit : and in the middle register it sounds like a man with the croup shouting " fire" from a fourth-storey window. It is much used by composers for mournful distracted effects, and in the opera of " La Somiambula" it is employed as the interpreter of a man calling down a dark alley for his lost dog. The flute is too familiar for the readers of the Kawkeyc to require any detailed description. In the hands of the young man living in the next block its expressive wailing notes are vaguely suggestive of a dog trying to crawl through a fence that is too close for him, assisted by another dog of greater weight and more initable temperament. The double bass is the largest ii k of the violin tribe. It is also the worst. The man who plays it is usually fat, and always bald. — Burlington Hawlccyc.