Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1895 — POPULAR SCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE.

Uranus is really a gigantic world, more than sixty times as large as ours. Its vast distance, now about 1.700,000,000 miles from the earth, is what causes it to look so small. The white rhinoceros has become nearly, if not quite, extinct. There are two stuffed specimens in England and one in the Cape Town Museum. It is the largest species of the genus. Herschel calculated the total weight of the atmosphere at eleven and twothirds trillions of pounds; and yet with this inconceivably vast weight it is only one one-million two hundred thousandth of the weight of the earth Itself. Prof. Milton Whitney, of Johns Hopkins University, has determined that in an ordinary wheat soil there are at least ten thousand million soil grains in a gram (about a pint), and In some of the finest soil this number has reached twenty-four thousand millions. Fog is caused by the atmosphere being warmer than the earth. Warm strata of air meeting the cold earth are condensed and turn into fog. The principle is the same as that used in distilling, where the warm passes through cold water, condensing the steam from the mast and causing It to be precipitated as a liquid. An earthquake is not made up of blows at all. It Is a continuous series of intricate twistings and oscillations In all possible directions, up and down, east and west, north and south, of the Irregularity both in Intensity and direction. Frequently it is quite impossible to find among these any single Impulse at all adequate to do th® damage which Is actually observed. This damage Is not done by a blow. It is done by the combination of many small motions and twistings taking place in many directions.