Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 April 1893 — POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES.

A Giant Bird. —A member of the Berlin Ornithological Society has seoured a living specimen of an almost extinct species of bird, about twice the size of an ostrich. The scientific name of the creature is Apteryx Sdssdti, and it comes from the northern island of New Zealand. Efforts are to be made to prevent these giant birds becoming extinct. To Explore tub Antarctic Continent. —The probability of a more thorough exploration of the Antarctic continent has directed special attention in scientific circles at the present time to that vast and remarkable region. It is an ice cap, nearly circular in form, and about 3,000 miles in diameter. Its thickness is still a problematical matter, and has been the subject of much theorizing by scientific men, who argue that, if there could be assigned to it a thickness of 15,000 feet, it would present a mass of ice large euough to displace the earth’s centre of gravity nearly a mile to the southward of its centre, a gradual displacement of this sort, caused by the slow accumulation of ice, would, as asserted by some, produce an imperceptible drainage of the oceans from the north to the south, and the gradual emergence of northern and submergence of southern continents. In fact, geologists claim that an examination of our globe exhibits an actual result of this sort. Thus the greatest mass of tlje ocean is gathered about the south pole—the northern hemisphere includes about five-sixths of the land surface of the gloh«—and it is affirmed that this inequality is increasiug, as evidenced in the Slow rising of the northern continents and the sinking of the islands of the Pacific. It is, however, considered more probable by some that the water is slowly draining away from the northern hemisphere and accumulating in the southern.

Solidified Air. —Another marvellous transformation has been effected by means of the new scientific agency. By means of inconceivable cold, air has been reduced not only to a liquid but to a solid. Prof. Dewar, an English chemist, has succeeded in producing in his laboratory a piece of solid air. He has not yet tested the nature or the new solid, whioh is almost as clear as crystal. It may be a jelly of solid nitrogen containing liquid oxygen, much as calves-foot jelly contains water diffused in gelatine. Or it may be true ice or liquid air in which both nitrogen and oxygen exist in solid form. Doubt arises from the fact that Professor Dewar has not been able by his utmost efforts to solidify pure oxygen, which unlike other gases, resists the cold produced by its own evaporation under the air pumps. Nitrogen, on the other hand, can be frozen with comparative ease. It has already been proved that in the evaporation of liquid air, nitrogen boils off first. Consequently, the liquid is continually becoming richer in that constituent which has hitherto resisted solidification. It thus becomes a question whether the cold produced is sufficiently great to solidify oxygen, or whether its mixture with nitrogen raises its freezing point,or whether it is really not frozen at all, but merely entangled among particles of solid nitrogen.

Life on tiie Planets. —Rev. Dr. Dallinger delivered a lecture at Bristol, England, recently, on the planets around us and their possible habitability. Speaking of Mercury, Dr. Dallinger pointed out its chief features and showed that they approximated to those of the earth. Although the heat from the sun there was more intense, it might be tempered by the character of the atmosphere. Venus was yet more akin to our world in every respect, so that life there, as- we know it, was yet more possible. The conditions of the atmosphere indeed were such that the whole globe might be habitable. Mars came next under review, the lecturer explaining its character, substance, atmosphere and other features, which he said made the existence of creatures, if not man, quite possible. People were slowly losing their former notions that there were nothing and nobody in the universe except the world and man. There were other worlds, however, which as far as human intelligence could judge were not yet suitable for habitation, but were gradually assuming conditions which might ultimately make life possible. The lecturer held the opinion that many years hence some means of mental communication with the denizens of the other planets might be established. In the present days of marvelous discoveries ita science all things seemed possible, and the establishment of intercommunication of some kind between this earth and the beings of the planets did not seem more improbable or impossible than the sending of a telefgraph message from England to New York seemed 100 years,ago.—[Pall Mall Budget.