Among the more recent applications of electricity is one for the desiccation of wood, by the Nadon Bretonneau method, by which wood is made as fit for use for certain exact processes in as many months as it has formerly taken years. It is also proposed by Mr. Shaw, an English mining engineer, to substitute water and steam for gunpowder in mine blasts, a cartridge of water being placed instead of the powder cartridge, and vaporized by passing the electrical current through it. SKETCH OF OSCAR SCHMIDT. Oscar Schmidt was characterized by Ludwig von Graff, his successor at Grätz, as a real naturalist who, keeping up with the advances of science and philosophy all his life, as a zoölogist spanned the whole domain of that science, giving equal interest to every part and branch of it. The animal as a whole, as a living being in the series of organisms, was the object of his concern, and all the parts of the animal and all the processes that go on within it were alike interesting and important to him; and the ultimate purpose of his study of that object was to gain from the facts disclosed a philosophic view of Nature. EDUARD OSCAR SCHMIDT was born at Torgau, Prussia, February 24, 1823, the son of a military chaplain who was descended from an old family of clergymen--"a man of fine Saxon culture, with no very great taste for theology, and open-minded to a ripe old age," and who died in 1875. His mother was of French and German (Hamburg) descent, and counted the great Aristotelian Petrus Ramus among her ancestors. The father was a gentle instructor to the son; and the latter, attending in the intervals of study to duties of the household and the farm and making good use of his opportunities for relaxation, enjoyed a young life that was invigorating to mind and body. He thus acquired tastes that led him frequently in his later life to leave the city and his study and go into the country to build and plant, whereby he endeared himself to the Badenese farmers. On rainy days and winter evenings, as he gleefully told of himself in 1858, the boy of eleven or twelve years of age entertained himself and had his fancy stimulated by reading Campe's old accounts of his travels. He thus became interested in geography, and acquired a thirst for travel that was never quenched.