horse hair, bridles with handmade bits, and silver ornaments their their braided reins, a marvel of patience. A spinning wheel for making ropes hangs from a fork of one wall-post.

The beds and chairs are covered with cowhide, the hair side up. In one corner stands a bull's hide sewed up from top to bottom, filled with beans, but lest the weavil should enter, the seam is smeared with cow manure. The odor of dried hides prevails over the scent of jasmine and orange blossoms from the little garden.

The farmers of Honduras are also

times they slip on the mossy boulders and a pair of long ears and flaring nostrils is all that can be seen as he goes down the rapids-but this does not always happen-sometimes all goes well; the mules file into the plaza, and the corn, dulcie or cheese is heaped in the marketplace. Corn is cheap at fifty cents a bushel, but sometimes it sells readily at five dolars. The rains come too soon, the bush would not burn, and only those who had plowed fields could plant.

Cotton is not grown commercially in Honduras though it is common in the house gardens, where it grows

its carriers, each one managing to keep a few pack mules. Only in a few places can the crude wooden carts be dragged over the roads, but the little mules go everywhere. You meet them in caravans from Olancho grunting under loads of Spanish cheese, or from the lower river carrying quintals of corn. The dulcie The dulcie shgas from Talanga, wrapped in its own "bagaso", comes on horses, for all the road is a plain.

There are no bridges. The drivers, with various disrespectful remarks, urge the mules into the rivers. Some

year after year into a tree. In Olancho the women still spin cotton. by hand into thread for fancy work.

In the valley of Amaratica are some farms where stock raising and planting are well combined. The best ranch there is owned by Viviana, an old woman known among the ranchers as very lively, which her name might imply. Her white adobe ranch house, with its red tile roof and spreading corridors, is plainly seen for miles across the Savannah against its background of bananas and plantain. Her corrals of split

"E

Bottling the Sun

XCELSIOR" of Paris (August 19, 1911), asks, "Can we put the sun in bottles", and adds, "it is a process that will, perhaps, be realized some day." It tells the story of an ingenious American who has already filched twenty-five millions from the pockets of the credulous! He gave it out that he had found a method of getting from the rays of the sun an energy which could be transformed at will into light, heat, or power. He asked for capital with which to demonstrate the utility of his ideas in manufacturing industries. Pocketbooks began to open and it was not long before he had five millions of dollars in his possession. Then he disappeared with most of the money and his marvellous invention was found to be a fraud.

"Excelsior", after reciting this story, which savors somewhat of "fish", asks, "However, is it scientifically impossible to put the sun in bottles? Was the public so foolish in trusting the American's advertisements?"

"Do not think it," said M. Deslandres to us. He is the Director of the Observatory of Mendon. "I believe," he said, "that in the future we will find practical methods for utilizing the solar heat, which has wonderful energy. It suffices to estimate its power when we calculate its effect on a square yard of earth. "The New York crook was wrong in saying that he would extract electricity from the sun. Probably there is electricity in the sun, but we do not know it. Wireless telegraphy has not recorded any electrical waves coming from it.

"What we could do easily would be

to employ the heat of the sun's rays for producing electricity. In doing that we would only apply a well known principle.

"To convince ourselves of it we need only recall Monchot's machine. A movable mirror, arranged to follow the great star in its course, carried in its center a black ball filled with water. The axis of its cone was turned toward the sun. The rays thrown on the ball speedily made the water boil. Nothing hinders us from thus putting in motion an electric machine.

"You know what "thermo-electric piles" are? Nobili has found one which is sufficiently practical made of bars of antimony and of bismuth soldered together. One of these faces presents all the solders equal, and the other presents them unequal. When there is a difference of temperature between the solders

an

electric current is produced. Some of these piles are of gas. They are employed in some laboratories. Nothing prevents making these piles from the sun. Theoretically, it would be easily possible. Perhaps, in the future, it will become practical. Did they not believe at one time that by simply exposing copper to the sunlight it would be transmuted into gold? Some alloys of copper under the influence of the sun's rays seemed to become golden and the change did not appear improbable.

After having heard the astronomer's opinion, "Excelsior" asked Mr. Edison's opinion on the question of "the sun in bottles". The greatest of the inventors of the new world replied, smiling, "Some Americans are capable, when they need money, of doing things much harder than putting the sun into bottles." (From the French by M. L. D.)

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Photographing Sound

RUSSIAN scientist, Dr. S. Lifshitz of Moscow University, has succeeded in doing away with the recording stylus used in the gramophone or phonograph and substituting a sort of photographic process.

The apparatus is described by Dr. A. Gradewitz in the September number of "Popular Mechanics" and the article is illustrated by pictures of the perforated film and a curious "sound photograph" of the letters L and A.

The particular merit of the device is that "the original voice is faithfully reproduced without the scratching noises characteristic of the ordinary phonograph”.

TH

-M. L. D.

The Telephonograph

HE same magazine gives us an excellent picture of the apparatus named the "Telephonograph", which is an "outfit connected with an ordinary phonograph". It will make permanent wax records of telephone conversations.

The names which could be given to this new invention are many and the cynic would, most likely, speak of it as a "Waxen Prevaricator" when used to denote telephone conversation between lawyers, with the stronger term, "Phonoliar" when employed by politicians. "Phonoexcuser" would be a proper designation for it in a printing plant, while "Phonostinger" would not be bad for the business man's constant companion.

The Italian electrician, Pierliugi Perrotti, who has invented the Telephonograph, may or may not find such suitable names for it in his own language! He has, however, tested the arrangement on the State Telephone lines in Italy. It is only necessary to talk a little louder than is usual when using the telephone. The apparatus is inexpensive and

will no doubt become of great use when perfected and "commercialized". -M. L. D.

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Bee Stings as a Cure for Rheumatism

HE sting of the honey bee, it is said, will cure rheumatism if you take it regularly and constantly. One patient who has been "taking treatment" for two weeks has been "stung" seventeen seventeen times andstrange to say-liked it! Men of science say that the formic acid which makes the sting of the honey bee so sharp destroys the pains of the disease. If the sufferer gets sufficient bee acid in his system he becomes "immune" so rheumatism will not invade it, which reminds one of what the Irishman said when he caught a little heart, the hornet, and, quickly letting him go, remarked earnestly, "Faith, an' his tail is hot."

-M. L. D.

Curing Disease by Electrical Heat

H

EAT has always been used for curing or relieving pain. But in the ordinary methods of application to the human skin by bandages, compresses, etc., it does not penetrate "to the depth of a fraction of a millimetre". A French savant, d'Arsonval, has devised a mode of applying electricity to blood pressure and curing_the_complaints incident to old age. Dr. Gradenwitz, in the September number of "The Technical World Technical World Magazine", describes the apparatus, illustrating it, as well as Dr. Nagelschmidt's "Internal Heat Apparatus".

With this device Dr. Nagelschmidt destroyed, Dr. Gradenwitz says, in a single sitting of ten minutes a lupus would have taken four hundred applications by the Finsen light to accomplish the same result.

D'Arsonaval's theory is that with his apparatus "it becomes possible to heat up any part of the body to