Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1886 — POPULAR SCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE.

A French botanist. M. Rnvßman, has enumerated 378 species of plants growing in Greenland, and he finds that they resemble those of Lapland more **>an those* of the American continent. The manufacture of solid carbonic acid gas had liecome a settled industry in Berlin. It is put up in small cylinders* and if kept under pressure will last Borne time-*-that is, a cylinder one and one-half inches in diameter, and two inches long will take five hours to melt away into gas. About midway between St. Petersburg and Moscow, Prince Putriatin has made the imjairtant arclnelogical discovery of an image of the constellation ..of Ursa Major engraved on a grindstone of the Stone Age, A similar discovery had already been made near Weimar in Germany. A botanist has attempted to estimate the*iumber of seeds found upon single specimens of some of the most obnoxious weeds of this country. For shepherd’s purse he makes the number 37,S(K) per plant; dandelion, 12,108; wild pepper grass, 18,400; wheat thief, 7,000; common thistle, <55,366; camomile, 15,920; common purslane, 388,800; common plantain, 42,200; burdock, 38,068. In order to settle the question as to the proper treatment for persons who have been frozen, Dr. Laptchinkski has made a series of very careful experiments upon dogs. He found, that of twenty animals treated by the method of gradual resuscitation in a cold room Tourteeh perished; of twenty placed at Ince in a warm room, eight died, while twenty put immediately into a hot bath recovered quickly and without accident. Skin from the back of a frog has been used by Dr. O. Petersen for hastening the healing of wounds. Grafts of the size of the thumbnail were caused to adhere firmly in two days, and in two days more the pigmentation of the transplanted skin had almost disappeared. The resulting cicatrice is of great softness and elasticity. Some of the London hospitals are now beginning to employ frog’s skin as grafts in place of other skin. It has been a matter of extensive belief in Franee that the drinking of water in considerable quantities has a tendency to reduce obesity, by increasing the activity of oxidations in the system, and favoring the burning away of accumulated fat. The error of this idea has just been shown by Dr. Debove, who has proven that the quantity of water taken has no influence on nutrition or body weight so long as the solid diet remains unchanged. Walls laid up of good, liardJiurned bricks, in mortar composed of good lime and sharp sand, will resist a pressure of 150 pound per square inch, or 216,000 pounds per square foot, at which figures it would require 1,600 feet high of twelve-inch wall to crush the bottom courses, allowing 135 pounds as the weight of each cubic foot. Walls laid up in the same quality of brick and mortar, with one-third Portland cement added, will resist 2,900 pounds per square inch, or 360,000 pounds per square foot, which would require a height of wall of 2,700 feet to crush the bottom bricks. According to the calculations'”made by a scientific writer lately, it requires a prodigious amount of vegetable matter to form a layer of coal, the estimate being ttiat it would really lake a million years to form a coal bed 100 feet thick. The United States has an area of between 300,000 and 400,000 square miles of Coal fields, 100,000,000 tons of coal being mined from these fields in one year, or enough to run a ring around the earth at the equator five and onehalf feet wide and five and one-half feet thick, the quantity being sufficient to supply the whole world foi’ a period of 1,500 to 2,000 years. When the coal is burned for illuminating purposes, the" estimated "waste is some ninety per cent.; in the heating of houses, 67 per cent, is lost.