People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1893 — Minute Wonders of Nature. [ARTICLE]

Minute Wonders of Nature.

Human hair varies in thickness from the 250th to the 600th part of an inch. The fiber of the very coarsest wool is only the 500th part of au inch in diameter, while in some species of the sheep it takes 1,500 of their hairs laid side by side to cover an inc h on the rule. The silk worm’s web is only the 5,300 th part of an inch in thickness, and some of the spiders spin a web so minute that it would take 60,000 of them to form a rope an inch in diameter. A pound’s weight of spider’s web of this size would reach around the world and then leave enough to reach from New York to San Francisco. A single grain of musk has been known to perfume a room for twenty yeaas. At the lowest computation that grain of musk must have been divided into 320,000,000,000,000 particles, each of thorn capable of affecting the olfactory argans. The human skin is perforated by at least 1,000 holes in the space of each square inch. For the sake of argument? say there are exactly 1,000 of these little drain ditches to each square inch of skin surface. Now estimate the skin surface of the averaged-sized man at sixteen square feet and we find that ho has 2,804,000 pores.—Chicago Herald.