Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1895 — SCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

SCIENCE.

The deposit of snow and lee In the Interior of Greenland is estimated to ! be a mile In thickness. The largest comets are so rarifled that they never harm planets or satellites by colliding with them. ! Mars is only 141,000,000 miles away from the earth, but every fifteen years it approaches to within 35,000,000 miles. I The Sierra Nevada range of California is nearly 500 miles long, 70 wide , and from 7,000 to nearly 15,000 feet high. Platinum has been drawn into smooth wire so fine that it could not be distinguished by the naked eye, even when stretched across a piece of white cardboard. A man in Bremen has invented a kind of “oil bomhs” for calming the waves, which can be fired a short distance. There are small holes in them, allowing the oil to run out in about an hour. In the northern hemisphere all storms revolve from right to left In the southi era hemisphere they revolve from left ;to right. Cyclonic storms never form ! nearer the equator than the third parallel of latitude.

The strongest timber known is the “Bilian” or Borneo ironwood, whose I breaking strain is 1.52 times greater | than that of English oak. By long ex- | posure it becomes of ebony blackness and immensely hard. Meteorologists say that the heat of , the air is due to six sources: (1) That from the interior of the earth; (2) that from the stars; (3) that from the moon; (4) that from the friction of the winds and tides; (5) that from the meteors; (6) that from the sun. j Granite is the lowest rock in the earth’s crust; .it Is the bed rock of the world. It shows no evidence of animal or vegetable life. It Is from two to ten times as thick as the united thickness of all other rocks. It is the parent rock from which all other rocks have been directly or Indirectly derived. i I Twilight Is longest toward the poles, I where the night of six months Is shortened by an evening twilight of about fifty days and a morning one of equal length. At the equator the length of the evening twilight Is about one and one-fourth hours, and remains almost constant the entire year.