Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1882 — CURIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC. [ARTICLE]

CURIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC.

A French scientist, who has been photographing the moon during partial eclipse, believes from the indications that the moon has no atmosphere. Prof. Paul Bert, of France, has n.'.ide experiments to determine the limit of safety in using chloroform. He found, not only in chloroform, but in all anaesthetics except protoxide of nitrogen, that the death dose is exactly double that required to produce insensibility when applied to dogs, sparrows and mice. A gentleman writing to the Scientific American on the habits of some Western snakes tells how the rattlesnakes worry the prairie dogs and destroy their young. It seems it is not an unusual occurrence to find whip, racer and bullsnakes with the entire contents of fowls’ nests in their capacious stomachs. This observer has seen a puff-adder fastened to the hind foot of a turtle, sucking its blood apd digesting off its toes. He found many box-turtles deformed in their hind feet, probably from this cause.

Epithelioma, or skin cancer; is generally occasioned by the long-continued or frequently repeated applications of an irritant, as in the case of Senator Hill, who had the peculiar habit of holding a cigar almost constantly in his mouth, and keeping the nicotinecoated end against the left side of >his tongue. This was no doubt the exciting in his case. It is well known that the Senator inlierited.fi predisposition to cancer, having lost a sister several years ago by the same disease. Many instances are on record where the disease has been traced to a shortstemmed pipe. A physician calls attention to the fact that if tobacco smoke be instantly ejected from the mouth and throat before descending into the Chest and be made to pass through a cambric handkerchief drawn tightly across the open lips, a permanent deep yellow stain, in size and shape to the opening between the lips, and having numerous spots of a darker hue pervading it, will be left on the handkerchief; but that the prolonged puff from the chest after inhalation from a cigarette fails, under similar circumstances, to produce any but a scarcely-perceptible and speedily-evanescent mark. What, in the latter case, becomes of the substance which stains? This physician thinks it remains in the lungs, and he therefore condemns the common manner of smoking cigarettes as dangerous. Prof. Lockyer is of the opinion that there are many facts suggested by the spectra of solar and stellar physics which seem to show that the elements themselves, or, at all events, some of them, are compound bodies. Thus, it would appear that the hotter a star the more simple is its spectrum; for the brightest, and, therefore, probably the hottest stars, such as Sirius, furnish spectra showing only very thick hydrogen lines, and a few very thin metallic lines, characteristic of the elements of low atomic weight. On the other hand, the cooler stars, such as our sun, are shown by their spectra to contain a much larger number of metalic elements; and, again, the coolest stars furnish fluted band spectra, characteristic of compounds of metalllic with non-metallic elements, and of nonmetallic elements. These facts appear to meet with a simple explanation, if it be supposed that, as the temperature increases, the compounds are first broken up ‘into their constituent elements, and that these elements then undergo decomposition into elements of lower atomic weight.