Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1896 — POPULAR SCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE.

Burveya and examinations of the bV tnminous 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 SOO 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 soot which comes out of the chimney of a single sugar refinery was gathered for six days and found to weigh 6,500 pounds. To the moisture in the air we ure Indebted for the maintenance of an even degree of temperature. But for it night Would lie colder than Greenland, even at the tropics. It is the water in the air that holds the sun's heat and keeps the earth warm where direct sunlight fails to fall upon bodies. It is said that there is no better or simpler way of testing suspected water titan the following: Fill a clean pint bottle nearly full of the water to be tested, and 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 / nfit for domestic use. Prof. 1; H, who has made scientific inqui, , uto nearly 100 instances of rain and now falls from the clear aky, says that he has found that in ths majority of such instances the fall took place on the southwest side of an area of low barometer at a distance of about DOO 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 !noh;, the second, a heavy shower of rain at Vevay, Ind., on the afternoon of Juna 30, 1877. In neither case was there a single cloud visible.