At a late meeting of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, M. Millot-Brule exhibited a black powder, obtained from a purely natural substance, which, should it come into general use, will gladden the hearts of gardeners. If you have a plant or shrub that you wish to preserve from noxious creeping things, you draw round it a circle of this black powder, and not a snail, or slug, or worm, or maggot, will attack it; for no sooner do they touch the black powder than they are thrown into convulsions, which speedily kill them off. A whole bed or plot may be sprinkled with it, and with the like results, and without injury to the garden. On the contrary, the powder is a good fertilizer. It is said to be a specific against the grape disease, and if blown lightly into an affected bunch, the oidium or fungus is seen to curl up and perish - killed as surely as the snails.

The composition of the powder is no secret; it is nothing but a species of lignite - sulphur-coal, as the Germans call it - ground fine. Large beds of it exist in many parts of the continent. Ardennes abounds with it; and it was with lumps dug from that region that M. Millot-Brule made his experiments. It is found in extensive deposits at Oppelsdorff, near Zittau in Saxony, where for some years past it has been turned to account for the preservation of timber. The sulphur-coal, to give it the local name, is reduced to powder, and made into a bath with water. The wood to be treated is plunged into this bath, and left there for a time without any mechanical pressure, until it has undergone a change which partakes of the nature of mineralization. Mere contact with the lignite appears to suffice; and we are told that beams which have been used in the works for thirty years, are sounder and more likely to last now, than when first put up. In Saxony, the railroad sleepers are prepared with this substance, and with manifest advantage.

Would it not do well for ship-timbers, docks, and water-side constructions generally! Sampson.

How can paint be REMOVED FROM BRICK walls! - Mr. Editor: - I have a brick house, which has for forty or fifty years been covered, at intervals, with a succession of coats of lead paint of different shades of color.

If any reader can tell how to remove it, and leave the bricks bare in good condition, as they were before the paint was first applied, and will give the information by a few lines in the Horticulturist, he will probably oblige others beside the present writer. O.