Various
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, October 1899
"A vague Impression of Beauty." – The following sentences occur in an article on The Real purpose of Universities in a recent issue of the London Spectator. They give so strange a picture of the ideals of the two leading English universities as to seem worthy of reproduction: "However, Dr. Hill made one statement for which we owe him a sincere gratitude. 'The excellence of the classics,' said he, 'lay chiefly in their complete uselessness.' … In this simple statement is expressed the true value of our old universities. They should be practically useless. They should not teach you to be a good carpenter or a skillful diplomatist. You can not march out of Oxford or Cambridge into any career which will return you an immediate and efficient income… The other universities of Europe are prepared to cut you to a certain measure, or to render you technically competent. But our English universities have hitherto declined to discharge this humble function, save in rare lapses, from a noble ideal. They at least profess to accomplish a far greater task. There is a strange period dividing the man from the boy, which clamors aloud for intelligent discipline, and this discipline Oxford and Cambridge are anxious to supply. The undergraduate is too young to specialize, and not too old to receive instruction. When his period of training is finished he is asked to assume the heavy burdens of life, to discharge tasks which may be dull, and which are rarely concerned with what were once called the humanities. As he passes through the university he may not have the time nor the wit to become a sound scholar nor a profound mathematician. But he may, if he understand his privilege aright, linger for a while in the groves of 'practically useless' knowledge. He may learn what literature meant in an age when it was concerned only with the essentials of simplicity; he may read the lessons of history when history was still separate from political intrigue. And though he forgets his Greek grammar, though in middle life he can not construe a page of Virgil, yet he carries away from this irrational interlude a vague impression of beauty which no other course of education will ever give him." Even for the schoolmen "a vague impression of beauty," whatever that may mean, seems rather unpractical as an educational ultima Thule.
The Purple of Cassius.– There are few substances in the field of inorganic chemistry on which so much speculation and actual work has been expended as the so-called purple of Cassius. A recent article by Mr. C. L. Reese, in the Chemical News, contains some interesting information regarding this curious compound. Up to the present time there have, it seems, been two views held as to its chemical nature – one that it is a mixture of stannic acid and metallic gold; the other, that of Berzelius, that it is substantially a chemical compound of purple gold oxide with the oxides of tin possibly mixed with an excess of stannic acid. It has seemed very likely that the substance is a chemical compound of acid character, and that the solubility in ammonia is due to the formation of a salt, but it has been found that by oxidation of stannous chloride and by allowing very dilute solutions of stannic chloride to stand, the "hydrogel" of stannic acid separated out, which, on the addition of a few drops of ammonia, liquefied and so became soluble in water, just as the purple of Cassius does. There can therefore be no salt formation here. Some comparatively recent work by Richard Zsigmondy, however, seems to have finally cleared up the chemical nature of this curious substance. Its formation is explained by assuming that when stannous chloride is added to a sufficiently dilute solution of gold chloride the latter is immediately reduced to metallic gold while stannic chloride is formed. Generally after a few seconds the liquid becomes red, but the purple is not precipitated for several days, unless it is heated. The gold is not precipitated as a black powder because the stannic chloride formed is immediately hydrolized into hydrochloric acid and the hydrate of stannic acid. The latter prevents the aggregation of the gold particles, and the stannic acid remains in solution as a colloid, which on standing gradually changes under the influence of the dilute hydrochloric acid to an insoluble form, the "hydrogel" of stannic acid. By heating, this change takes place immediately. The properties of the purple of Cassius depend on the properties and character of the stannic acid present, and the great variety in the properties of the stannic acids, the ortho, the meta, and the colloidal mixtures of the two explain the many contradictions in the literature with reference to the properties of the purple of Cassius. Zsigmondy says, "I look upon the knowledge that a mixture of colloid bodies can behave, under some conditions, as a chemical compound, and that the properties of one body in such mixtures can be hidden by those in another as the most important conclusion to be drawn from this work."
The Abuse of Unskilled Labor.– The number of diseases directly or indirectly due to continued long standing is especially numerous among women. The London Lancet, which nearly twenty years ago attempted to improve matters in this respect in the case of shopgirls, has again taken up the subject, and recently published an editorial urging customers of the shops to boycott those establishments where no sitting accommodations are provided for the clerks. It says: "We, as medical men, maintain that sitting accommodations are absolutely necessary for shopgirls. The only argument having even the semblance of legitimacy which we have heard put forward in defense of the nonprovision of seats is that sitting is conducive to idleness, but in this connection such a premise can not be permitted, for an employee would be bound to come forward when an intending purchaser entered the shop… The very fact that in many shops she is not allowed to sit down is conducive to idleness – idleness of the worst kind, the idleness of pretending to do something while in reality nothing is being done. Can nothing be done to stop this – as we once called it without the least exaggeration or sensationalism – 'cruelty to women'? To the true woman – the woman with feelings for her sisters, the woman of love and sympathy, the true woman in every sense of the word – we appeal for help in this matter. If such women would abstain from purchasing at shops where they see that the employees are compelled to work from morning till night without permission to rest from their labors even when opportunity occurs, we should soon see the end of a practice which ruins the health and shortens the lives of many of our shopgirls." That there is a certain amount of danger for women from long-continued standing, to the point of exhaustion, there is no doubt, and much can be done toward improving the present conditions in this respect and in other hygienic ways in the shops. The large influx of women during recent years into the counting-room and the salesroom gives such questions an increasing importance, especially in the less skilled positions where labor combinations for mutual protection are not possible. There has already been considerable agitation of the question in this country, and there still remains much to be done. But, as Lord Salisbury pointed out in causing the rejection of a bill for remedying present shop conditions in England, it is a question not suitable for legislation, and can only be settled through the indirect action of public opinion on the shopkeeper himself.
The Occurrence of Gold Ores.– The following paragraphs are from an article by H. M. Chance in the Engineering Magazine for July, entitled The Increasing Production of Gold: "Another reason for anticipating further increase in the production of gold is found in our better knowledge of gold ores, and of the conditions under which gold occurs in Nature. Until the discovery of the Cripple Creek district the occurrence of gold as tellurid in deposits of large extent and value was practically unknown. Gold was, of course, known to occur, sparingly in some ores, partially as a tellurid associated with other minerals; but such a mineralized belt as that at Cripple Creek was entirely unknown, and such deposits were not looked for by the prospector. Similarly, we now know of another class of gold ores in which the gold occurs apparently in some form chemically combined in a siliceous matrix, often approaching a true jasper or hornstone, and showing by analysis possibly ninety-five per cent of silica. Such ores show no trace of 'free' or metallic gold, and the presence of gold can be determined only by assay or analysis. A few such discoveries have recently been made, accidentally, by inexperienced persons, who had rock assayed from curiosity. Similarly again, in the last few years gold has been found in most unpromising-looking porphyry dikes – the very rocks prospectors the world over have regarded as necessarily barren because they almost invariably fail to show any 'free' or metallic gold by the miner's quick 'horn' or 'pan' test. But mining engineers and prospectors are learning that in a mineralized region gold may occur in any rock, and hundreds of prospectors are assaying all sorts of most unpromising-looking rock, satisfied that by assay alone can they determine whether a certain rock is gold-bearing or not. This persistent and more or less systematic work now going on in every mining district must result in the discovery of many valuable deposits in unexpected localities, and ultimately promises to add largely to the annual output of gold."
MINOR PARAGRAPHS
The investigations of F. E. L. Beal of the Food of Cuckoos and S. D. Judd of the Food of Shrikes in their relation to agriculture are published in a single bulletin by the Department of Agriculture. Mr. Beal finds that the food of cuckoos consists almost wholly of insects, of which he has found sixty-five species in their stomachs, and concludes that from an economical point of view they rank among our most useful birds; and, in view of the caterpillars they eat, it seems hardly possible to overestimate the value of their work. Mr. Judd finds, from a very extensive examination, that the food of butcher birds and loggerhead shrikes consists of invertebrates (mainly grasshoppers), birds, and mice. During the colder half of the year the butcher bird eats birds and mice to the extent of sixty per cent, and ekes out the rest of its food with insects. In the loggerhead's food, birds and mice amount to only twenty-four per cent. Its beneficial qualities "outweigh four to one its injurious ones. Instead of being persecuted, it should receive protection."
The Engineering Magazine is authority for the following: "The wrecking of the steamship Paris on the coast of Cornwall and the difficulties encountered in attempting to save her while a number of her compartments forward are filled with water, lead Mr. Richards, in the American Machinist, to suggest the applicability of compressed air. 'There is a means of expelling the water from the filled compartments so obvious, and so certainly effective, that it seems unaccountable that some engineer has not suggested it before this. Close the hatches of the flooded compartments and drive the water out by forcing air in. It would not make the slightest difference how big the holes might be in the bottom, as the water would be expelled and kept out on the same principle as in the old-fashioned diving bell.' This suggestion carries with it a much larger and more important one – namely, the use of air pumps instead of water pumps to save a leaking ship while afloat. As Mr. Richards well remarks, the work of trying to pump out a leaky ship is not only enormously wasted while it is going on, but it is never finished. If, however, the water leaking into a compartment of a ship be expelled by pumping air into the space, the work is done so soon as the compartment is filled with air down to the level of the leak. After that point is reached the ship is safe, no matter how large the hole, and no further pumping is necessary."
Chlorate of potash has always been regarded by manufacturers and chemists as a nonexplosive, and hence there has been little care taken in handling and storing it. A recent explosion, however, at a large chemical works at St. Helens, in England, seems to disprove this view. A storehouse containing about one hundred and fifty tons of chlorate in the form of both powder and crystals took fire, and almost immediately after the falling in of the roof an explosion of terrible violence occurred, the shock being felt over a distance of twenty miles. The chlorate works were entirely demolished. A large gas holder of the city gas works, containing two hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of gas, was burst and the gas ignited. Eight hundred tons of vitriol was poured into the streets of the town by the wrecking of ten vitriol chambers in a neighboring alkali works. Houses were unroofed, and in the main streets of the town, a quarter of a mile away, nearly every plate-glass window was demolished. A theory accounting for the explosion, advanced by Mr. J. B. C. Kershaw, in the Engineering and Mining Journal, is that it was due to the sudden and practically simultaneous liberation of all the oxygen from such a mass of chlorate, combined with the restraining influence of the kegs (the chlorate was packed in kegs of one hundredweight each), and possibly also helped by the presence of much charred wood and the dense volume of smoke. Whatever is the true theory, however, it is evident that our belief in the nonexplosiveness of potassium chlorate must be modified.
NOTES
A piece of experimental glass pavement was laid in Lyons, in the Rue de la République, last fall, and it is reported to have worn very well thus far. The silicate of which the pavement is composed is called by the manufacturers ceramo-crystal or devitrified glass. It may be finished in various colors and with a rough or smooth surface. The blocks are made by heating broken glass to a temperature of 1,250 °C. and then compressing it by hydraulic power. The resulting compound is said to have all the qualities of glass except its transparency.
The New York Agricultural Experiment Station reports of its analyses of sugar beets in 1898 that the average percentage of sugar in the samples analyzed is 14.2, with a coefficient of purity of 85. In general the yield of beets was between nine tons and twenty tons per acre.
An altitude of 12,440 feet, or 366 feet greater than any attained before, was reached in the kite-flying experiments at Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts, on February 21st. The flight was begun at twenty minutes to four in the afternoon, with a temperature of 40° and a wind velocity of seventeen miles an hour at the surface. At the highest point reached by the kite the temperature was 12° and the wind velocity fifty miles an hour. Four improved Hargreave kites with curved surfaces, like soaring birds' wings, were used tandem, and the flying line was a steel wire.
The first to be unveiled of a series of tablets to be fixed by the Municipal Council of Bath, England, to mark historical houses is on the house where William Herschel lived in 1780, and was officially unveiled by Sir Robert Ball, April 22d. In a little workshop at the end of the back garden of this house Herschel made his Newtonian reflector, and here he discovered Uranus.
Attention is called by Dr. Martin Ficker to the fact, brought out in his experiments, that cultures of microbes are affected by the glass of the tubes in which they are made. By virtue of differences in composition, different sorts of glass give varying degrees of alkalinity to water in contact with them, and the activity of the bacteria they contain is correspondingly affected.
We have to add to our obituary list of persons in whom science is interested the names of Professor Socin, late of the University of Leipsic, Orientalist, and author of Baedeker's Palestine and Syria and many special works on the Arabic language and dialects; M. N. Rieggenbach, correspondent of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Section of Mathematics, at Olten, Switzerland; Elizabeth Thompson, donor of liberal gifts for scientific purposes, at Stamford, Conn.; she contributed toward the telescope for Vassar College, was a patron of the American Association, and endowed the Elizabeth Thompson Scientific Fund; George Averoff, who died at Alexandria, Egypt, July 27th, leaving, among other bequests, £20,000 to create an agricultural school in Thessaly, and £50,000 to the polytechnic schools at Athens; Charles J. Stillé, ex-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, under whose administration the institution took a great stride in its development; Mrs. Arvilla J. Ellis, an assiduous student of the fungi, who assisted her husband, J. B. Ellis, in preparing and mounting the five thousand specimens for the North American Fungi and the Fungi Columbiani, and more than two hundred thousand other specimens which were distributed to the botanists of the world, at Newfield, N. J., July 18th; M. Balbiani, Professor of Embryology at the Collége de France; Prof. Pasquale Freda, Director of the Station for Agricultural Chemistry at Rome; Dr. S. T. Jakčič, Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanic Gardens, at Belgrade; Dr. Carl Kuschel, formerly Professor of Physics in the Polytechnic Institute at Dresden; M. A. de Marbaix, Professor of Zoölogy and Anatomy in the Agricultural Institute at Louvain; Dr. N. Grote, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy in the University of Moscow and editor of a journal devoted to those subjects; Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, the eminent German chemist, of whom a fuller notice will be given; and Sir Edward Frankland, another eminent chemist (English), one of Bunsen's pupils, a member of the Royal Commissions on Water Supply and River Pollution, and author of researches on the luminosity of flame and the effect of the density of a medium on the rate of combustion, died in Norway, aged seventy-four years.