Should we have the ill-fortune to be half-drowned, suffocated by unwholesome gases or vitiated air, or to fall down in a fit, Dr Woillez is ready with his new apparatus for artificial respiration. The patient's person, all but the head, is placed in a cylinder of iron, from which one stroke of a powerful pump extracts the air; the lungs and chest of the sufferer expanding as the vacuum is formed. Eighteen such mechanical breathings can be produced in the minute, and at each of these a quart of air--double the quantity inspired in normal health--rushes in to oxygenate the blood. The _spirosphore_ is beyond all doubt a potent agent in serious cases, but some cautious surgeons have expressed fears as to the secondary results which might attend its use.
Nothing but praise can be bestowed upon the successful efforts of M. Lenoir to construct a looking-glass which should neither grow yellow, and give us back a bilious presentment of ourselves as silvered mirrors do, nor destroy the health of the workmen, as was the case in the old process of mercurial amalgamation. The new glasses are backed with silver, washed with quicksilver certainly, but in solution not in vapour, and therefore innocuous to those who handle it.
Alcohol, as we know, can be distilled from almost anything; but Apothecary-Major Ballard, of the Cherchell Hospital, in Algeria, deserves some notice for finding out that Barbary figs, so called, will yield it in profusion and of excellent quality. The stoniest tracts of North Africa are indeed dappled with the flaming red blossoms of the prickly pear or cactus, and the fruit, guarded by its thorny envelope, can be had for the gathering. One ton and a half of these wild figs will give about sixteen gallons of colourless alcohol, at eighty-five degrees, and with a _kirschwasser_ flavour. The same weight of beetroot yields but fifteen gallons of the far weaker spirit in common commercial demand; while beetroot, an exhausting crop, can only be grown on the best and most highly cultivated land.
The most enthusiastic advocates of ballooning would have hesitated to declare that submarine surveys were within the province of the aëronaut. Such, however, seems to be the case, since M. Duruof and his companion going up in a balloon, on the twenty-fifth of last August, at Cherbourg, and being at an altitude of five thousand feet, were amazed to see beneath them, with startling distinctness, every rock, fissure, and depression at the bottom of the sea. And yet the sea opposite Cape Lévy, where the aërial voyagers obtained this bird's-eye-view, has an average depth of above two hundred feet. So limpid did the water appear that the under-currents were perceptible, whilst nothing would have been easier than to sketch or map the bottom of the sea.