Scraps.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1818, 1 March 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

Scraps.

Five years must elapse before the scientists have finished their calculations upon the transit of Venus. If the Medical Press is to be credited, Professor Schuethauer, of Pesth, in making a post-mortem examination of a woman of about seventy years of age, discovered that the spleen was not only absent, but had never existed in the person of the subject. The discovery in Tonquin of a plant of great therapeutic virtue and its miraculous qualities are described at length by M. Lesserteur, formerly a missionary in Tonquin and now Director of Foreign Missions in Paris. The healing properties of the Hoangnan, at the plant is called in the Anamite language, were, until a short time ago, known only to a single native family, which finally, having become converted to Christianity, communicated the secret to the French. M. Lesserteur avows that the bark of the Hoangnan cures hydrophobia, leprosy, and the bites of reptiles immediately and invariably, but is itself a violent poison in cases to which it is not applicable. It is true that some birds and insects disappear from districts which Asiatic cholera is about to invade ? A simple assertion means nothing ; but a late number of the Italia del Popolo which cites a great many localities from which birds and insets departed just before the advent of cholera is well worth studying. The Journal of Science is the authority for the assertion that some persons who are particularly sensitive to the bites of gnats and midges experience a return of the original irritation at regular intervals of twelve and twenty-four hours. This fact, if fact it be, would seem to lend strength to the opinion that gnats. and mosquitoes are the bearers of the germs of malarial fever. Dr. Clauston, in the annual report of the Edinburgh Insane Asylum, says that in very acute cases of depression and maniacal exhaustion he has substituted milk and eggs for stimulants with remarkable success. A bad case of acute delirium was cured by a diet of four quarts of milk and sixteen eggs daily for three months. He says :" I preach the gospel of fatness as the great antidote to the diseases we have to treat." Professor Fisher, of Munich, has succeeded in obtaining from distilled coal a white crystalline substance, which, as far as regards its action on the system, is exactly the same as quinine, though it assimilates with the stomach more easily than quinine does. It will be observed that the sweetest scents, the most brilliant dyes, the most powerful disinfectants, and one of the most useful medicines in the world are obtained irom coal-tar!