Morris tribune., 1884-08-27
SCIENTIFIC MISCELLANY.

Lord Rayleigh has made some in
teresting Investigations ON color
blindness with an apparatus in which
| the spectra are OVerlapped SO as to
produce various mixtures OF cOlOrs,
which are examined and described by
| the person under test, One of the
| things he has shown that the MAORI
| ty of people require only half as much
| red in the mixed spectra to turn yell
low into green as he does himself.
| BY far the most common form OF color
| blindness is blindness to red. Dr..
Guthrie, who is so afflicted, is more
than usually sensitive to blue light;
and others have been found with an
abnormally acute perception OF red.
One person appeared who suffered
from the very rare defect of being
color-blind to green. These results
have led an English astronomer to
suggest that some of the startling
changes alleged to have been
noticed among the heavenly bodies
have really never taken place, the
supposition of such changes having
probably arisen from the different
color-perceiving power of different
observers.
That the cause of cholera is a mi
| croscopic organism was first recOg-
nized in 1854 by Fillippo Pacini, of
Florence, the parasite being in 1882
classified by Tommasi-Crudeli among
the schiZOmyceti, or germs which
multiply by simple division. Pacini
supposed that the organism attached
muscus membrane of the intestines,
but his doctrine was ridiculed or dis
regarded until the same conclusion
was reached by the commission of
eminent German pathologists which
has just investigated the subject in
Egypt. The cholera germ multiplies
in the soil where the exceptions of
cholera patients have found their way
but it may also find and an abiding
place in bed-linen which has been
fouled bySsuch excretions and washed
| without disinfectants, as was shown
in 1855, when a poor Tuscan woman
died with cholera received from lin
en- which had been infected an entire
year before. Tommasi-C rudeli re-
marks that cholera in Europe is al
ways an importation from the East,
never becoming acclimatized like
small pox. and that it becomes cpl
demic only when the excretions COLI
| tanning the germ find soil favorable
to it's multiplication.
An Eastern writer declares that
there is now no reasonable doubt that
the old Arabian alchemists and others
! derived their ideas on the transmuta-
ton of metals into gold and the belief
in immunity from death by the use
of philosophers stone from China.
! Mercury is stated to have been the
philosophers stone of which Geber
and others wrote, and cinnabar-red
sulphuret of mercury-Was known to
the Chinese as early as the seventh
century before the Christian era, it's
occurrence on the earths surface be-
ing said to indicate gold beneath
Mercury was accessively employed by
the Chinese as a medicine, and in the
ninth century an Emperor was killed
by an overdose. Their medical books
say it takes 200 years to produce Gin
nabar; in 800 years it becomes lead: in
200 years more it becomes silver; and
| then by obtaining Transforming SUBJ
stance called "vapor of harmony it
becomes gold. This doctrine of the
transformation of mercury into other
metals is 1000 years old in China.
The Chinese contend that when mer-
curry is taken into the animal system
it not only prolongs life but expels
bad vapors, poison, and the gloom of
an uneasy mind.