The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

49 . Water, drawn from the feed pump, should give a delicate red ring to a drop of phenolphthaline, but should in no way affect litmus paper. This is an almost ideal condition of the feed water, and should in practice be ob- tained--if the lime mixer is working properly. ' It is also well to recollect that lime and soda have distinct reactions with silver nitrate (AgNO;) and tend to confuse a "casual observer testing for salt (NA.CL.). - Soda gives a dark brown precipitate 'with AgNOs, lime a light brown, salt a 'dead white. Thus lime or soda may not only be confused with, but may even con- -ceal the presence of salt. Lime also gives a rise of density in the 'hydrometer test varying from 0.007 to 0.008 at 200° F. per pound of lime in each ton of distilled boiling water. This is taking the density of sea water as 10. In conclusion, a moderate use of lime, with the aid of a good lime mixer, can be 'relied upon to save a marine engineer in charge of a battery of boilers, whether W. T. or Scotch, an endless amount of worry and trouble with regard to their cleaning, pitting and general working con- ditions. Secretary of the Navy Metcalf has approved the report of the court of inquiry appointed to investigate the grounding of the cruiser Colorado on Liplip Point, Puget Sound, Aug. 20. The report exonerates the officers, ~ Capt. Underwood, commander; Lieut. Comdr. Tarbox, navigator, and. Lieut. Comdr. T. S. Wilson, executive offi- cer... The report states that the acci- dent was unavoidable because of a fog and incomplete soundings of the channel. The Colorado was not seri- ously injured and was soon repaired at the navy yard at Bremerton, Wash., but she was unable to accompany the fleet around the world. A letter has been sent to Secretary Straus of the department of commerce and_ labor urging that steps be taken to chart the channel where the accident oc- curred more thoroughly. The navy department is about to erect a wireless station' in~ Prince William Sound, Alaska. It will be about 500 miles from the military wireless station at Fort Gibbon, which is now being installed, and will form the connecting. link between that sta- tion and the naval wireless station at North Head, Wash. The government will.then be able to maintain a wire- less service up the Pacific coast to the Alaskan station, which forms part of the Alaska Ens wireless telegraph system. Tre /AaRINE REVIEW FERTILITY OF RESOURCE IN THE ENGINE ROOM.* BY J. G. HAWTHORN. A very eminent engineer, one of the most beloved members of our. pro- fession, the late John Macfarlane Gray, once said that "breakdowns at sea were providential ways of educat- ing marine engineers," and perhaps that sentence might form a text for the following remarks. I propose that we shall imagine certain break-downs to happen in the case of an ordinary marine triple-expansion engine, and see how best to get over the difficul- ties. I shall not specify any particu- lar kind of engine, neither shall I ex- pect any reader to say "we could not do that on our ship, we have not the same facilities,' but I should like to put before you a few general hints as to what might be done if certain things happen. Whenever anything goes wrong it is the engineer's duty at all times to look for the symptoms, and from them to diagnose the fault. Commencing with that bugbear of the engineer's existence, namely, the engines bringing up suddenly, let us imagine a case where the engines are brought up very quickly to within three or four revolutions from full speed. The first thing I would sug- gest doing is to prove that the stop valves and throttle valve are in good working order, by opening the drains, and blowing the steam through. A clean blow through proves whether or not these valves are right--they have 'been known to have the seats lift, or the spindle to strip. Let us suppose we have the steam blowing through all right; our next duty should be to reverse the link motion and see if the engines will go astern. Should they not go astern, we may safely as- sume that the slide valve is adrift on the spindle; but should the engine re- verse and go astern, we then know that it is in ahead gear where the fault lies, and we should trace it from valve spindle down to eccentric sheave. We may find the rod bent, due to an overheated strap; thus the valve would not probably reach high enough in its travel to give a free exhaust from the top of the piston (taking a direct-acting valve) and closing again So soon would 'thereby increase the compression on tthe top of the piston so that the engine could not get over the top center; or we may find the key. of the eccentric sheared off, with the possibility of the shaft revolving *From a paper read befo re the Institute Marine Engineers, oe 'perheating. inside the sheave. Should the high pressure valve become injured beyond repair, I would then suggest, having removed the broken parts, to shut down the engine stop valve till the pressure by the intermediate gauge showed about 80 to 90 lb. and go on working as a compound engine, [ would also suggest that the piston rod and connecting rod of the high pres- sure engine be removed, or the con- necting rod only be taken down to- gether with the eccentric rods, putting on a stop plate to hold up high pres- sure piston and rod. I also suggest that this should be adopted in the case of a broken piston rod, connect- ing rod, or shaft. Regarding the pressure carried, I should say that it would be better to maintain the full boiler pressure, and by wire drawing through the engine room stop valve to reduce the pres- sure; this would entail an easier time for the boilers; besides, the throttling of the steam would tend towards su- I would also suggest that links be kept in full gear. In the event of the thigh pressure ahead ec- centric rod being broken, we may re- sort to slinging up the link at the astern end, substituting the astern way rod for the ahead rod, but great care should be ttaken to see that the valve setting is the same and the rods are of the same length; this woula enable the engines to still be main- tained 'triple expansion, but we could only go the one way, so that upon approaching our port of destination we could then remove the ahead rod, taking out the valve, working the en- gine as a compound engine for ma- neuvering purposes. OTHER FAULTS DIAGNOSED. Coming now to the intermediate engine: Should the valve be broken, we have no other choice than to ex- haust from the high pressure engine round to the low pressure engine; or, should the piston be so fractured that we could by no means repair the same, we should have to do the same thing. It is interesting to see for a moment what would be the result of this. In the first place, the high pressure engine opened for ex- haust there would be a considerable drop of pressure in passing round to the low pressure valve box; and we should probably find that the high Pressure engine had considerably in- creased the horsepower by the reduc- tion of back pressure. Let us presume a Case, steam entering the high pres- sure at 180 lb. by gage, cutting off at or about one-half stroke, giving a terminal 'pressure of about 75 lb. by when