Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1895 — POPULAR SCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE.

Surveys and examinations of the bituminous coal beds of Pennsylvania have led the Government experts to announce that at the present rate of consumption the supply will not be exhausted for 800 years to come. Mr. J. W. Spencer, who has been examining the evidence that the West Indies were once a part of a great continent, concludes that it existed, and that these islands were once connected with what is now the mainland of North America.

The extent to which a chimney can poison the atmosphere has been scientifically determined by a test made In Berlin. The toot which comes out of the chimuey of a single sugar refinery was gathered for six days and found to weigh 6,800 pounds. lo the moisture in the air we are indebted for the maintenance of an even degree of temperature. But.for it night would be colder than Greenland, even at the tropics. It is the water in the air that bolds the sun's heat and keeps the earth warm where direct sunlight fails to fall upon bodies. It is said that there is uo better or simpler way of testing suspected water than the following: Fill a clean pint bottle nearly full of the water to be tested, aud dissolve in It half a teaspoonful of loaf or granulated" sugar. Cork the bottle and keep in a warm place two days. If the water becomes cloudy or milky within forty-eight hours it is unfit for domestic use. Prof. Russell, who has made scientific inquiry into uearly 100 instances of rain and snow falls from the clear sky. says that he has found that in the majority of such/nstaiices the fall took place on the southwi-si side of an area of low barometer'at a distance of about 500 miles from Its center. Two noted instances of the kind under consideration, one of snow and the other of rain, have received much attention from the meteorologists. The first was a snow storm from a clear sky at Bloomington, 111., March 15, 1855, in which the ground was covered to the depth of an inch; the second, a heavy shower of rain at Vevay, Ind., on the afternoon of June 30, 1877. In neither case was there a single cloud visible.