Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 February 1889 — The Paradoxes of Science. [ARTICLE]

The Paradoxes of Science.

The water which drowns us, a fluent streamcan be walked upon as ice, says Blackwood's Magazine. The bullet, which, when fired from a musket carries death, will be harmless if ground to dust before being tired. The crystallized part of the oil of roses, so grateful in its fragrance—a solid at ordinary temperature, though readily volatile—is a compound substance, containing exactly the same elements, and exactly the same proportions, as the gas with which we light our streets. The tea which we daily drink with great benefit and pleasure, produces palpitations, nervous tremblings, and even paralysis, if taken in excess ; yet the peculiar organic agent called theine, to which tea owes its qualities, may be taken by itself (as theine, not as tea) without any appreciable effect. The water which will allay our burning thirst augments it when congealed into snow; so that it is stated by explorers of the Artie regions that the natives.“prefer enduring the utmost extremity of thirst rather than attempt to remove it by eating snow.” Yet if the snow be melted it becomes drinkable water Nevertheless, although if melted before it enters the mouth it assuages thirst like other water, when melted in the mouth it has the opposite effect. To render this I paradox more striking, we have only to remember that ice, which melts more slowly in the mouth, it very efficient in allaying thirst.