Who hasn’t heard of the “Police Eye”? Only, no one has it seen.
Well, it will exist, assures us the “Pêle-Mêle”.

It owes its birth to an English inventor. The “Police Eye” is simply a photographic lens, or rather four lenses. These objectives are placed in appropriate places, in the walls of rooms where we fear the visit of thieves...

Electrical contacts, hidden under the carpets or the grooves in the parquet floor, activate a whole series of mechanisms which ensure that, when an intruder enters the room, the four lenses open at the same time as a magnesium capsule bursts.

The thief, terrified by the explosion, fled without suspecting that at least one of the four lenses had just photographed him." It's simple and practical. You still had to think about it.

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Do you know that the Academy's dictionary contains a host of naiveties? Here are some examples:

We talk about the jay, a bird with variegated plumage, which is of the kind we learn to speak to”;

cabbage is a food plant of which there are a large number of species, and which is usually put in the pot »

In general, the most common terms in natural history are the most sacrificed. The algae is called "a kind of grass which grows in the sea and which it sometimes throws on its banks", in ignorance, no doubt, of all freshwater algae.

We could take the quote further. But in fact. Mr. Maurice Donnay, who participated in this writing, was he not a Montmartre humorist?