Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 February 1890 — REMARKABLE FACTS. [ARTICLE]

REMARKABLE FACTS.

Every One of Which You will Find Most Interesting:. One hundred and seventy-five million cells are in the lungs, which would cover a surface thirty timer greater than the human body. The gotd beaters of Berlin, at the Paris exposition, showed gold leaves so thin that it would require 282,000 to produce the thickness of. a single inch, yet each leaf is so perfect and free from holes as to be impenetrable to the strongest electric light; if these leaves were bound in book form it would take 15,000 to fill the space of ten common book leaves. The hottest region on the earth is on the southwestern const of Persia, where Persia borders the gulf of the same name; for forty consecutive days in the months of July and August, the thermometer has bien known not to fall lower than 100 degrees night or day. - - A bundle dT~Bpider webs not larger than a buckshot aud weighing less than one drachm would, if straightened out and untangled, reach a distance of 350 miles. On dark nights a white light can be seen farther than any other color; on bright nights red takes the first place. Sweden is perhaps the most Protestant country Tn the world; of a population of 6 millions there are only 2,000 Roman Catholics, the remainder of the population belonging almost entirely to the Lutheran church. Vegetable flannel is a textile material now largely' manufactured in Germany from pine leaves; the fibre is spun, knitted, and 'woven into undergarments and clothing of variouß kinds. Twenty-one observatories are now engaged in the international undertaking 04 photographing the entire heavens; e;ich observatory will have to take about 700 photographs in the zone assigned to it, and it is hoped to finish the work in three or four years. In water in which vegetables have been infused, the microscope discovers animalculi so minute that 100,000 of them would not exceed in bulk a single mustard seed, and these infinitesimal creatures are supplied with organs as complete as those of the whale or elephant.

Of 13 million barrels of salt annually consumed in the United States Michigan furnished two-sixths. New York one-sixth, ten other salt, producing states one-sixth and two-sixths are imported. .■ The city of Chicago in its present boundaries contains 178 square miles. England is the greatest pin-making country in the old world; ils product is about 50,000,000 pins a year, and Birmingham is the center, with an outturn of 37,000,000. Tax stamps have been established in Switzerland to enable the poorer classes to pay their t ixes in small installments; the taxpayercafi buy weekly a few twenty-five or thirty centime stamps, and so gradually clear off his debt t o the government. The longest reach of railway without a curve is that of the New Argentine Pacific railway, from Buenos Ayres to the foot of the Andes, for 211 miles it is without a single curve, and has no cutting nor embankment deeper than two feet or three feet. The average pulse in infancy is 120 per minute; in manhood, 80; at 60 years, 60; the pulse of females is more frequent than of males. Not including Alaska, Brazil is larger in extent than the United States, it possesses within its limits an area of 8,287,961 square miles, with a population of 12,338,375. Postal cards are made at the rate of 4,000 per minute. The amount of coloring power stored in coal is such that one pound of the mineral yields magenta sufficient to color 500 yards of flannel, aurine for 120 yards of flannel, 27 inches wide, vermilline scarlet, for 2,560 yards of flannel, alizarin for 255 yards of Tur-key-red cloth. It is calculated that a range of mountains consisting of 176 cubic miles of solid rock falling intp the sun would only maintain the heat for a single second; a mass equal to that of the earth would maintain the heat for only ninety-three years, and a mass equal to that of the sun itself falling into the sqp would afford 33 million years of sun-heat.