Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 82, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1910 — THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW [ARTICLE]

THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW

Detroit people have organised a Jean VaJjean elu'b to ftlrnlah assistance to paroled prisoners. Bled eight feet from the ground a rubber-yielding tree bf fifteen Inches diameter gives three pints of liquor. The city of London corporation consists of the lord mayor, twenty-five other aldermen and 206 common councillors. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals employs over 160 officers to detect and prevent cruelty. Many tons of wool were ruined In North China last August by heavy protracted rains, when there was no way of keeping ;the wool dry. • One of the Western States has sent east, as a, sample of the agricultural possibilities, nineteen apples, each weighing more than a pound. At the end of 1909 the Bell Telephone Companies owned 3,600,000 telephones, while 1,500,000 were owned by companies under contract agreeing with the associated Bell Companies. This is an increase of 600,000 telephones during the year. The system comprises 10,260,000 miles of wire, 400,000 miles of which were added last year. Half of the total mileage Is underground. The travels of grains of sand have long been a matter of scientific record, says Harper’s Weekly. Years ago It was established that particles picked up on the coast of Pas de Calais had thbir origin in the rocks of Brittany, from 120 to 180 miles distant. Another standard fact is the discovery on the coast of Denmark of chalk dust which undoubtedly came from the cliffs of Normandy. Miss Anna C. Hedger recently resigned the principalship of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls in New York to become the head of the new department of household economics In the University of New Zealand. She was chosen for this work by a special envoy following an investigation of the work of leading instructors in domestic economics in England, Canada and the United States.

Recently at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences Charles H. Townsend described his studies in the Strait of Magellan. Among other things, he spoke of the native tribes lnhafbltlng that region, and expressed the opinion that those dwelling among the more westerly channels of the strait are probably the lowest of existing primitive raoee. They go almost naked and live mainly on shell-fish. According to a Turkish newspaper of 1876, William E. Gladstone was born in 1796. For father he had a Bulgarian. His gluttony for gold made him yellow. He was of medium height, his whiskers were cropped close to his face, and “as a sign of his satanlc spirit his forehead and upper forehead were bare. His evil tamper has made his hair fall off, so that from a distance he might be taken for quite bald.” It has been supposed that the ancients had some method of hardening bronze tools, the secret of which had been lost. Professor Gowl&nd of the British Institute of Metals, says that the ancient bronzes were very Impure, so that their hardness could not have been due, as sometimes assumed, to their exceptional purity. On the other hand, Inasmuch as modern bronzes by careful hammering can be made as hard as the ancient ones, the legend of a lost art in bronze hardening seems to be exploded. Thirty feet beneath the surface of a newly built railroad in Spokane, Wash., a ginkgo leaf was found last spring, Its age being estimated at one hundred thousand years. "It bears a message of more certainty than those carved In tablets of stone,” writes Fred Nlederhauser, in Harper’s Weekly. "This discovery tends to substitute the theory that the coast section has been formed by successive upheavals of the earth’s crust, occurring slnco the appearance of the great sea dyke, which has now developed Into the system of the Rocky Mountains.” Men go down to the sea under billowing canvas In fewer and fewer numbers, the “tin kettle” tramp now doing the old clipper’s work, but Neptune still exacts his toll from the square-rigged ships that are fated to float out upon the oceans bound ten thousand miles or more and never again be heard of. Ten big sailors thus vanished in . 1908; last year eight windjammers of large burthen were recorded on the world’s log of misßlng ships. One was an American, the fourmasted Fort George of 1,770 net tons; and there are few enough of ours left. Most of them are swallowed on Cape Hors voyages.—New York Press. Nature quotes an article in the Physlkalische Zeltschrift by Dr. J. J. Koesonogow, of the Unlverslt of Kiev, on the application of the ultramicroscope to the study of the phenomena of electrolysis. He finds that when an electrolyte is examined under the ultramicroscope, at the moment the current is switched on there appear in the field of view a number of bright points of light which travel toward the electrodes with velocities of the same order of magnitude as have been found for the lons. The path may be deviated by means of a magnet. When a point reaches an electrode It MtPfißJm JtQ attach Itself and take a crystalline form. None of these appearances is observed in the case of a nonelectrolyte, and the author considers he has proved beyond the possibility of doubt that the ultramtcrosoope provides a powerful means of studying the motions of the lons In electrolysis.