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The Lucknow Sentinel, 1919-09-25, Page 2I Should be Possible to Teach WholeIt Races to Eat the Valuable Foods of Other Lands. maker of we knew was sys- i i French would the English contend, no use when The Latin name whereby the probably have form. But, the “London” name “Londres” was Robert Louis Stevenson always con­ tended that the most beautiful place names in the world are those of North .America. Londoners can visit some beautiful­ ly named places without journeying far from home. William Sharp re­ lates that “Matthew Arnold, from whom I first heard of thatTtovely Buck­ inghamshire region now made easy of reach by railway from Rickmans- worth, that valley of the Chess where he loved to angle and where he com­ posed so much in prose and verse, said to me: ‘What a happy fortune to be a native of a region like this, with such delightful names as Chenies and Latimer and Chesham Bois and Chalfont St. Gilesi—Norman roses In old Saxon homesteads.’ ” Kent, too, possesses some fascinating names. “Some almshouses at Cobbam, near Gravesend,” writes Samuel Butler, “have an inscription stating that they belong to the ‘Hundred of Hoo in the Isle of Grain.’ What a lovely refrain for a ballad!’ ” The city which we call “Florence” is by Italians called Firenza. The name of the British capital is to the French Londres and to the Italians Londra. By English speaking people the Austrian capital is referred to as Vienna, whereas the Austrians spell it Wien. In addition to these differences there may be cited Dunkirk and Dun- i kerque, Cologne and Koln, The Hague ! and La Haye, Geneva and Genf. What is the reason for these differ- i ences? Is it to be sought in philo- ! logical influences alone or is it to be j found in that somewhat contemptuous 1 I i “London” existed at the time French word “Londres” came into use the adopted French was in coined. British town first became known else­ where was “Londinium.” The loca­ tive case of this noun (the one most often used in colloquial style) was Londini. It followed that in the con­ tinuous interchange of words and their development into modern speech Londini very easily became Londri in the speech of the Frenchmen. Then, as “i” is an indication of a Latin plu­ ral, a new difficulty arose. When I Londini was accepted by the French I it was for some time treated, quite ; mistakenly, just as a French plural noun would be and spelled accordingly i —Londrps. Londres made its way I from France to Italy. As the last two letters were silent, the Italians re- : jected them, replacing them by the ! favorite unaccepted final vowel of i their tongue, “a,” with the result that , the name of the British capital be- ' came in Italy Londra. Vienna in English and Italian and i Vienna in Spanish are simply relics of the mediaeval days when Latin was the universal tongue of the and the French Vienne is but variation of Vienna. Geneva explained in the same way. The nations have taken great liber­ ties with the name of the Dutch capt- tal, Gravenhage. With the English The Hague and the French La Haye we have cause to be grateful. The Spanish shortened the cumbersome Dutch name into Haja; the Italians converted it into Aja, and even the Germans boiled it down into Haag. learned, a slight may be I EACH COUNTRY HAS A LIMITED BILL OF FARE. attitude toward things foreign that exists more or less in every land? In the first mentioned case it has been pointed out that had the word CHEMIST IS THE MAGICIAN OF MODERN GOLD MINE. ' How Cyanide of Potassium is Used The Rand, South Africa, to Free Precious Metal. in It will probably be surprising to the average reader to learn that the ma­ terial and assured success of more than one great gold field of the world is due to the assistance of one of the most deadly poisons known to man. The chemist plays no small role in the world’s drama, and it is not too much to say that he is the magician of the modern gold mine. On the great gold field of the Wit- watersrand, in the Transvaal, 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, nug­ gets remain, as they have ever been, a dream, whatever the experiences of the “forty-niner” of California or the “fossicker” on Australian El Dorados may have been. The golden lure that made Johannesburg the most cosmo­ politan of cities in Africa is nowhere visible, while its actual existence is only evidenced by unsightly belching smokestacks and mountainous masses of “tailings,” or fine white sand. It is with these latter, or rather with their evolution, that it is proposed to deal in this short exposition of a dead­ ly poison’s active but beneficial in­ fluence. Visible Gold Thing of the Past. The nature of the gold deposits of the Rand is such as to render most of the individual mines anything but paying propositions under systems, at one time at least, found perfectly feasible in other parts of the globe. There, Waters, whence comes at least one- third of the world’s wealth, gold is a thing of the past, precious metal is hard held may be termed an iron hand; content with imprisoning it crushable stone Nature further secreted her gold in what is known to geologists as iron pyrites. In these tiny shining specks, which to the unitiated seem the “real thing,” the life pursuit of millions is contain­ ed, and no amount of crushing will extract it. It is here our friend the chemist comes upon the scene his stuff, three drops of which tion would suffice to kill a man. Not all gold, however, is so ciously held, and to obtain this what is known as the “free milling” ore the rock is beaten under mighty Iron stamps weighing 2,000 pounds each until—in a fine sand and mixed with water—it is poured in a muddy I on the Ridge of the White visible and the in what for not in mere has still with solu- tena- from | flood over copper plates covered in mercury (quicksilver). These catch up the “free” gold, leaving the still water borne sand to be carried away in little wooden canals or flumes until in huge vats capable of holding hun­ dreds of tons it is collected in order to undergo “medicinal” treatment. Swift and Deadly Poison. Now while the water is being drain-' ed off the vats a word about the origin and nature of this mysterious agency which liberates gold almost as quickly as it can destroy the life of man and beast. As a salt in beautiful snowy cubes it is known as cyanide of potas­ sium and is a salt of hydrocyanic acid, or prussic acid, the well known swift and deadly poison. Quantities of the cyanide having been dissolved in water to an approved strength, the solution is poured upon the sands in the vats until they are submerged by a few inches. The cyanide solution immediately begins to exercise its functions by attacking the gleaming pyritic crystals and eating out the im­ prisoned gold so that what previously looked like a collection of diamonds under the microscope now presents the appearance of furnace slag. After a few'hours of this treatment the gold is, almost to a grain a ton, in solution, and, deadly as ever, this is run through pipes into long, narrow, partitioned extractor boxes, the com­ partments of which are filled with fine zinc shavings. As is seen by the brisk bubbling of hydrocyanic acid gas which ensues, the gold is rapidly taken up by the zinc, which discolors and “rots,” ultimately becoming a thick black sludge resembling nothing so much as filthy river mud. But what precious mud! How “Mud” is Treated. At the end of the month the flow of solution through the boxes is tem­ porarily stopped and the unaffected zinc is removed, and after the addi­ tion of alum or lime has cleared the coal black liquid the pure solution-is carefully siphoned off as close as pos­ sible to the muddy deposit—which, be it remembered, is gold and not to be trifled with. This literal “pay dirt” is then scooped up into pans and left to dry for a time, after which it is placed in a calcining furnace on a thick iron plate heated to a cherry red. This is to burn off the zinc which has suc­ cumbed to the chemical action of the syanide, and after very careful ravel­ ing with iron rods for the purpose a chocolate covered powder remains. Here we have the long suffering gold in another form. The powder is then drawm off with much care—for it “dusts” very easily and there are bet­ ter ways of breathing an atmosphere of gold—and, being mixed with due proportions of clean sand, carbonate of soda and borax, is placed in plum­ bago crucibles and subjected to the fierce heat of 1,000 degrees which the smelting of gold demands. I II One of the great problems of the war was complicated by the likes and dislikes, the childish whims fixed by age, with regard to the great food staples of the world. Each country had some food of its own that seemed absolutely necessary to the life of its people, and when they were unable to get what they were accutomed to it took almost literal starvation to drive them into trying something different. For instance, the Commission for Relief in Belgium were seriously handicapped by the Belgians’ refusal to eat corn meal, which they consider­ ed to be food only for chickens and hogs. In England, also, people used corn meal with the greatest reluct­ ance. Canadians are enormous consumers of milk; it is almost impossible for us to imagine our kitchens continuing without milk; yet the only milk sold in densely populated parts of China is human milk for babies and invalids. In Japan, although cows have long been used there as beasts of burden, no one knew how to milk them until after Westerners landed in 1853. There is now no dairy industry among those hundreds of millions of Orientals; yet they are as strong and healthy as we are. The Influence of Taste. Since the sense of taste determines so largely what foods we shall eat, let us analyze this tasting organ of ours and see what the relation is between it and the nutritive value of foods. The pleasure of taste or its anticipation increases the flow of saliva, and that starts the digestive processes of the stomach and intes­ tines. Experiments with animals show that the palatability of rations is a highly important element in nutri­ tion. Although a ration may possess all the necessary food ingredients, it will fail to nourish the animal proper­ ly if it is not palatable. But the pal­ ate is not, as many persons suppose, a guide to the detection of poisons, ex­ cept that many of the deadly alkaloids of plants are extremely bitter. Ex­ amples of the failure of taste to pro­ tect us may be found in the death of children from eating sweet wild pars­ nip, in the accidents from eating the deadly amanita mushroom, in the poisoning of cattle from the eating of the loco weed, and in the danger from rhubarb leaves that are too old. Taste is, furthermore, peculiarly de­ pendent on sight. Last year the writer brought home a butter substitute made from cocoanut. It was white and of a different texture from but­ ter, and the children declared they did not like it and could not possibly eat is. I blindfolded them and gave them little pieces of bread, some but­ tered with dairy butter and some with the cocoanut substitute, and con­ vinced them that they could not tell the difference by taste alone. What, of taste vate? without hobble along without sight or without hearing. A man once proved that he could live and work three hundred days at a stretch potatoes reds of who live on dried are millions in British India who scarcely ever see anything except rice on their tables. Those are the unde­ veloped peoples of the world, so far as sense of taste is concerned. Extend Range of Diet. We make use of our sense of taste thousands of times a year. We talk about it as we do about the weather, —incessantly—yet, just as we limit our knowledge of the weather to the small but important part of it that we happen to be in, so the range of our taste is too often limited to the few things with which we are familiar. If we can only cultivate a national taste for a wide can do much to bility of our race ing environment. lesson from the Japanese,' who have introduced lessons in the cooking of foreign foods into their girls’ schools. The man who is particular in what he eats 13 handicapped, as everyone knows who has traveled with such a one. The cook dreads to have., him come to her mistress’s house; the hostess is chagrined to see her best efforts wasted on a dish that her guest refuses. The whims of a child’s taste give way in many cases to a liking for the very things that at first it seemed im­ possible for him to »eat. What adult fails to remember his childish abhor­ rence of tomatoes, green olives, Roquefort cheese or salad oil? We do not acquire those tastes merely by growing older, for growm-up Cana­ dians do not fancy all the delicacies of other lands. The Chinese taste for ten-year-old eggs, for example, is hard for us to understand, although they are really no morel intense in flavor and smell than Limburger cheese is. It is also hard for us to appreciate kava, the popular drink of Samoa, which the women make by thoroughly chewing up the roots of the pepper vine and then mixing the mass with water. The Maoris and the Mexicans have a fondness for live grubs that seems strange to us; and so, too, does . the fondness for high-tasting game in England. Canadians look up­ on the high game flayor as an indica­ tion of the “presence of ptomaines." Learn to Like New Foods. such extraordinary tastes as 1 that are valuable and nourish- That a hornet is both a paper and an able builder even before insect science tematized. But the processes by which the paper is made and the elaborately planned nest is built were shrouded in mystery until they were studied by Charles Janet, a French­ man whose investigation of insect life has attracted much attention. / Janet found that a hornet’s paper­ making methods will bear comparison with those of our ordinary paper mills. The hornet seeks some rotting tree, removes a piece of wood, and chews it till he produces a ball of pulp about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Laden with this, he flies to the nest. The search for a suitable piece of decayed wood and the chewing of it have con­ sumed not more than six minutes, and perhaps only two. Clinging to the comb with his middle and hind feet, the worker jiggles the ball of pulp with his ously to hesive. disposes building able part of the nest, he attaches the ball and then drags it, leaving behind a narrow strip of paper. As the ball of pulp is unreeled it is shaped by the Insect’s jaws, and by incessant tamping, along the joint it is glued to the sheet of'which it is to form a part.-^ When the ribbon has reached a length that varies from half an inch to art inch and a half the hor­ net returns nearly, but not quite, to the point of beginning and deposits a second strip, soon after that a third and so on to completion. After a certain stage in this singu­ lar -work of construction has been reached the queen of the hive emerges from her royal seclusion and performs a most astonishing operation. Carry­ ing a ball of pulp of her own, she spins around one leg as a radius and deposits a circular ribbon of paper. Less agile than the -workers, who com­ plete their labors in two or three min­ utes, the queen requires at least minutes for her spin. Instead of building annexes to hive, the hornet may use half the of pulp in cell building, although whole balls of very fine pulp are gath­ ered for this special purpose. In prin­ ciple, cell building is exactly like the process described, but the paper used is finer and the work is carried on with greater qare. Like a good arti­ san, the worker retouches the moist cell after completion, smoothing down inequalities and finishing the walls with exquisite attention to detail. Although the paper of which the cells and envelopes are fashioned is in itself perilously weak, the nest can sustain an astonishing weight of larvae and hornets, which speaks well for the engineering skill of the builder. i five the ball then, is this wonderful given us for if not to Of course we can get cultivating it, just as we can sense cultt- along on nothing except There are hund- of poor Afghans and milk, thousands for eight months of the year mulberries and -water. There millions If those can be cultivated, is it not pos­ sible to teach whole races to eat new foods ing? The usefulness of doing so has been clearly proved by the danger that a nation with a fixed fashion in food runs when war threatens the supply. J There are many nqw foods readily available for our use.fif we can only learn to like them. The soy bean of China and Japan offers a striking ex­ ample.# In Japan it covers, I am in­ formed, a larger area than any other crop except rice. Hundreds of varie­ ties of it exist in Japan and in China, and the uses for it are many more than ours are for the navy and kidney beans. In both countries the products of- the soy bean take the place of milk. When we come to recognize the full value of the soy-bean curds, or “tofu,” and of the soy cheeses, and learn to use them to supplement our milk pro­ ducts, and when we come to appreci­ ate the fine meat flavor of soy sauce, which is made by fermenting soy beans and wheat together, there will arise a demand for hundreds of mil­ lions of bushels of;that remarkable field bean. Besides Containing a very valuable oil, the soy bean has in it vegetable proteins that are easily di­ gestible. We Occidentals have used animal fats and animal proteins from milk, which is literally wrung by hand from the udders of patient cattle, and have derived our high flavors from the protein of their - dead bodiies; whereas the Chinese and the Japanese have in large part taken their protein from soy-bean milk and their flavor­ ing from the fermented soy sauce. variety of foods, we increase the adapta- to its rapidly chang- We can well take a Oversight. “These photographs you took of us are not at all satisfactory, and I re­ fuse to accept them.” “What’s wrong with them?” “What’s wrong? Why, my husband looks like a baboon.” “Well, that’s no fault of mine, ma­ dam. You should have thought of that before you had him taken.” fore feet, chewing it continu- make it more plastic and ad- After sufficient chewing he of the ball in repairing or in additions. Selecting a suit- $1,750 the Square Inch. Which are liable to fetch the big­ gest prices—rare old books or rare old pictures? Among the most valuable books in existence are a copy~'of the Mazarin Bible, printed on paper, and sold for $13,450; the same book, printed on vellum, which brought $17,200; Boece, Croniklis, Edinburgh, printed on vel­ lum for JamesV., which changed hands for $19,500; and the famous Psalter­ ium, Fust and Schoeffer, which pro­ duced as much as $20,250 when Ber­ nard Quaritch purchased it. But these sums fade into nothing­ ness beside the prices paid for old pic­ tures. Franz Hals “Old Lady” was purchased a few years ago for $137,- 000. The top price for a Romney is $206,850; for a Holbein, $360,000; for a Velasquez, $400,000; and for a Rem­ brandt, $500,000. Worth more than any of these is Raphael’s “Panshanger Madonna,” sold in 1914 for $720,000. This picture is painted on a panel measuring 23 inches by 17 inches, 2 inches thick. It cost, therefore, about $1,750 per square foot. -----.-----fr—-------- They Were Just Waiting. The very peppery president of a manufacturing company in Ohio makes himself so disagreeable over trifles that it is a delight to the men who work for him when something occurs to upset his arrogance. One cold winter morning he was storming through the plant and, as usual, looking for someone upon whom to vent his ill-humor, when he caught sight of two men idly warming them­ selves by the fire in the forge shpp. In a rage he roared: “What are you fellows waiting for?” “We're waiting for pay day and five o’clock,” one of the men replied with a grin. The president called the superinten­ dent and ordered, “Discharge these two fellows at once.” “I am sorry,” said the superinten­ dent meekly, “but I can’t discharge those men. They belong to the Lake Shore Railway, and are going to switch our cars just as soon as we loading.” Work has started on construction of the irrigation system into the: Tabei’ district, Alberta. finish Mm.....— 1 **■' —»«a The Laziest of Birds, laziest of birds is the He sleeps all day, instead of s frog- and at instead of flying about in of food, he sits on a limb and The mouth, night, search literally waits for the insects to come and feed him. He is such a sound sleeper that you can push him off his perch with a stick and not wake him.. He inhabits Australia and the islands of the Indian Ocean. In size the frog­ mouth resembles the whip-poor-will, and gets his name from his wide mouth, which serves as his insect trap. Too lazy to fly for his food, like other birds, he crawls along the limb of a tree opening his wide mouth and snap­ ping it shut, catching what flies and gnats come within his range. At night he perches with his mate on the roofs of houses, on fences, or stumps. Only after the sun goes down does he show any inclination to move about. An English Lad. The Prince of Wales is an English lad, And what is there more to say? For out of the lists of Galahad, Into the listsyof to-day, An English lad has rode his horse, Galloping all the way. An English lad has galloped straight, Clad in his shining mail, Breaking the blodtly spear of Fate, On the quest of the Holy Grail; And wherever the fiercest foes were set There did his arm prevail. From Francis Drake to Jellicoe, From Crecy to Cambrai, An English lad has met the blow, Leading us all the way— And the Prince of Wales is an English lad; * What is there more to say? For an English lad is an Eiglish lad, Whatever his shield or crest; Whatever the rank or birth he had His heart still ksops tho quoct. If the Prince of Wales is an English lad, His blood is the best, the best! --------------- A New Sun. It is a mistake to suppose that the face of the sky never develops a new feature quite apart from the occasion­ al visit of a comet. New suns actual­ ly come into ken, stars which were never there before. The latest and most remarkable was Nova Dersei, a new sun, ten thousand times as brilliant as Old Sol. It is thought that a phenomenon like this is caused by a celestial collision be­ tween two dead suns which haye been rushing together and gathering speed for hundreds of years. When the crash comes the sparks fly. A speed of-millions of miles per hour, and a bulk equal to tens of thousands of our worried little earth, is .sudden­ ly converted into heat, and a new sun blazes out in the sky; yet oftener than not so infinitely distant that it makes no impression on the midnight sky as seen by the naked eye. But it is well to be' distant, as if such heat were generated in our own sun, although it is ninety-two millions of miles away, this world, and all that it contains, would shrivel up like wisp of wool in a candle-flame. a --------- ----------- Conservation of Salmon. The reduction in the run of salmon in the rivers of British Columbia has greatly increased the utilization of the fish. When the runs were large, some canneries merely used the large or 'centre portion of the body, the re­ mainder being sold as offal to the fish reduction works, to be converted into oil and guano, or thrown away. The canneries report that, at pre­ sent, nothing is wasted in any species of salmon, as the supply is not equal to requirements. The backbone is never cut out, and the flesh is used as close to the head and tail as possible. This closer utilization in a measure offsets the shortage of fish and in­ creases the supply which would other­ wise be available. THE TRAGEDY ■ OF BEAUTY MANY TIMES HAS THIS GIFT PROVED A- CURSE. Lovely Women Whose Attractions Have Snared Them to Dishonor and Death. Bohemia had hardly recovered from the shock of Billie Carleton’s untimely death, when the West End was sud­ denly horrified to hear of a tragedy, hardly less terrible—the suicide o£ another outstanding beauty, Mrs. Atherton, says a London writer. Say what one will, there cannot be the slightest doubt that the scores of women beauty in the long run is noth­ ing more or less than a curse. Just as in the far-off days It was a curse to Cleopatra, or fifteen hundred years afterwards to Mary Queen of Scots, so it has been through all the stages of human history. From a Scottish Village. Near the village of Davidson’s Mains, Midlothian, stands a school­ house ■which for a number of years visitors came from far and near to have a peep at, it being the place where another famous beauty re­ ceived her early education—Evelyn Thaw. A beautiful child she was, at­ tracting universal attention, even when only ten or twelve; but how many of those who smiled approving­ ly on her budding loveliness could have guessed at the appalling tragedy that was scon to cloud the very dawn of her womanhood—a tragedy embrac­ ing the murder of the American mil­ lionaire, Stanford White, the sensa­ tional trial and sentence of Harry Thaw, and the v,’recking of a life which a few years previous was brim­ ful of nought but the highest hope. Take the case of one of those extra­ ordinary beauties, the Gunnings. So exquisitely beautiful were these fair sisters, it will be remembered, that when they walked out in the London parks, they were provided with an ’ armed escort to keep the crowds from inconveniencing them. Yet in spite of the w’orldly advantages their beauty procured for them—for one the heart of a duke, for the other that of an earl—tragic in the extreme were the last days- of one of these wonderful women. , k When in the course of years her beauty began to fade, she took to arti­ ficial means to improve her appear­ ance, and in the end so poisoned her system that her life was despaired of. The woman who was all sunshine and happiness when the world was at her feet, could no longer bear up when the adverse winds of circumstances howl­ ed round her castle w’alls. The Friend of Nelson. “Now that I can be no longer beauti­ ful, let me die,” was one of her last utterances; not surely a very exalted or inspiring declaration to come from the lips of one fast approaching death. Though she has been in her grave nigh on a hundred years now, people have not ceased to rave of Lady Ham­ ilton, the friend of Nelson, the en­ chantress of the painter Rommey, the woman who, from poverty and obscuri­ ty, rose to such fame and power as to count in her train some of the most distinguished men in Europe. How many are aware, however, that at the very time when her beauty wras at its very height, the fair Emma wrote to Greville that she was so abjectly miseiable that she proposed returning, to Scotland, even if she hadHo walk barefooted through the snow, deter­ mined first to put an end to his life, and after that, hei’ own? One of the loveliest women of her day was Elizabeth Lindley, the girl who eloped with Sheridan. “The Beauty of Bath” was the name by which this wonderful woman was known in her younger days, yet at one time so aggrieved was she by the attentions of a suitor with whom she wished to have nothing to do, that she, in spite of her youth and beauty, act­ ually attempted to poison herself. What more exquisite-lodking woman than the Red Widow, tried a few years ago in Venice amidst scenes of 'such phenomenal sensation? What more awful power than hers, however, for the destruction of the men with whom she came in contact? Her whole life was a record of tragic events, of love, despair, murder, and self-destruction. Even Royalty Cannot Escape. No one looked on Charlotte Corday but raved of the unequalled charm of her face and figure, her rich masses of auburn locks, her splendid-shaped lips, her wonderfully-spirited expression. Yet what more horrible end could woman possibly go to than Charlotte Corday? Suaely head more fair was never forced under the blade of the guilloiTnd. Born in a very different cjrcle from Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette was another famous beauty whose life ended in pitiable tragedy, and in more recent days what of that beautiful friend of Queen Victoria, the late Empress of Austria? Singularly un­ happy all her life was that fair daugh­ ter of a proud race, but her sudden as- sissination at the height of her power came as a terrible blow to all those associated with her. In Abyssinia the wife is always considered to be the head of th( nftl] aa " — V