Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1894 — SCIENTIFIC SPARKS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SCIENTIFIC SPARKS.

Diamonds Becoming Cheap The “Geomagr etifller.”

T the recent meeting of the chemical section of the Brit-' ista Association for the Advancement of , Science, the artificial diamonds that have been made by

VI, Moissans, of Paris, were exhib.ted and awakened much interest. These, as yet, are hardly of suffi:ient size to be marketable, but there ippears to be no longer doubt that Jus and the co3t are only questions if technical detail, and that another lecade at most will suffice to reduce liamonds to the level of the ameyyst or the Rhinestone. Brother Paulin, one of the brothi of the Christian School near La v, France, has devised and ex* imented with a system which he ■ms “geomagnetics,” which has esulted in some surprising results n agriculture. What be calls the ‘georaagnetifier” is a resinous pole, •rom forty to sixty feet high, plan ted n the middle of a field, supporting through jnsulators a galvanized iron :od with five terminal branches of ;oppcr. This collector of the electricity in the atmosphere is connected with a system of underground vires, deep enough to be out of the reach of ordinary cultivation, aniT placed six feet apart. This system, tried in a potato field, under the supervision of the Monthrison Society if Agriculture, resulted in the fol.owlig facts, as »set forth in their -eport: “A geomagnetitier about twenty-eight feet in height made its influence felt over superficies of

[Dotted lines show underground wires.] sixty-five feet radius. ** * The stalks were measuerd and were found (September 23) to reach a hight of five feet and a diameter of threefourths inches. * * * One hundred and four square feet of the influenced portion furnished 186 pounds of tubers: 104 feet of the non-influ-enced portion furnished 138 pounds.” So, also, have grapes, spinach, celery, radishes and "turnips shown an increased productiveness under this utilization of atmospheric electricity equal to that obtained from the use of expensive chemical fertilizers. Professor Bailey, of Owens College, England, has recently written of the steady increase of what is known as “black fogs" in England. From statistics it is known that these menacing collections of the mineral impurities in the atmosphere are now about eight or ten times as prevalent as they were a century ago. He says; “In the earlier part’of this century Manchester, with a population at that time of about one hundred and twenty thousand, had on an average about four or five dense fogs during the winter, whilst at the present day (with a population of 500,000) we have dense fogs, lasting the whole day, on twenty days or more, and fogs of less density are experienced on forty or fifty days.” Eugene Murray Aaron, Ph. D.

THE GEOMAGNETIFIER.