At a recent meeting of the Geological Society in Johannesburg, South Africa, a number of diamonds which had been obtained from the Simmer Deep mine were exhibited.
An application to buy all the bark of black birch on a large watershed in one of the national forests in the Southern Appalachians has been received by officers in charge, who say that the bark will be used by the mountaineers to make sweet birch oil, a substitute for oil of wintergreen.
There are more than forty-eight thousand sawmills in the United States, and their output of waste in the form of sawdust, shavings, slabs, and other wood refuse is estimated as thirty-six million cords per year.
That satisfactory wood-pulp can be made from a number of heretofore little known woods is evidenced by a Government publication, just issued, which contains seventy samples of paper manufactured by different processes, chiefly from woods heretofore practically unused for this purpose.
Regulations have been issued under which private individuals and corporations may without further delay begin the leasing and operating of the vast coal fields of the territory of Alaska.
The National Geographic Society in a bulletin says: "If the United States and Denmark strike a bargain and the three islands which comprise the Danish West Indies are transferred to the former, the sale will mark the culmination of a bit of bartering which began nearly fifty years ago, when the American Government offered $7,500,000 for the 138 square miles of territory in the Antilles.
