News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1886-02-11
SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL.

From tests made by DR.. Fischer, the
German chemist, it appears that in ordl-
nary stoves not more than twenty per
cent. of the fuel consumed is utilized In
warming the rooms.
Both cork and camphor trees grow
finely in California, and it is believed
that their cultivation might be made very
profitable. Olive trees also flourish, and
the number of orchards is increasing.
Krupps famous works at Essen have
turned out a larger number of guns dur
ing the last three months than are usual
ly produced in whole year. The heav-
lest delivery was made to Turkey, after
which came Greece and Seryia.
Some Indian arrow heads were lately
shown at the SOciete d'AnthrOpologie,
Paris, which were poisoned with curare
over century ago, but still retained
their deadly power. Small animals
scratched with them died in half an
hour.
Lieutenant Greely has arrived at a firm
conviction that ice in the sea never forms
to depth of more than five feet to ten
feet The hoebergs and icebergs OF great
thickness that are encountered floating
out at sea, he maintains, are mere detached
portions of the great polar ice-cap.
There is some prospect that cocaine,
the valuable an9sthetic, will not always
be as costly remedy, and, therefore, as
inaccessible to the people in general as
heretofore According to the Vienna
Hedicai Journal cocaine has been success
fully procured, not from cocoa leaves, but
in a synthetic way from chemicals by w.
Merck, in Darmstadt, and others.
A London paper asserts that the highest
velocity yet impaired to a cannon ball is
1 ,626 feet per second, equal to mile in
3.2 seconds. The velocity of the earth at
the equator, due to rotation on its axis, is
1 900 miles per hour, or mile in 3.6 sec
onds; thus, if a cannon ball were fired due
west, and could maintain its initial veloc-
ity, it would beat the sun in its apparent
journey around the earth.
French vine growers are at their wits
ends to find proper remedy for the dis
eases which affect their plants, most of
the chemical preparations hitherto used
having utterly failed to check the ravages
of insects. One of the latest remedies
proposed-namely, the plunging of pine
UODS unUeT tIlG NlUc oIOChS--l1tlo tiL ICttoO
the merits of simplicity and cheapness.
Its discoverers, if they can be so called,
aver that the resinous properties in the
pines will prove of sufficient strength to
kill the puceron which causes so much
trouble in the vineyards. But this re-
mains to be seen.
In an address before the Liverpool Geo
logical society, by Professor Reade, on
''FThe Denudation of the Two Americas, "
he shows that $50, 900, 900 tons of matter,
in solution, are annually poured into the
Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi river,
and this, it is estimated, would reduce
the time for the denudation of one foot
of land over the whole basin-which
time has hitherto been calculated solely
from the matter in suspension-fromo one
| foot in 5000 years to one foot in 4, 800
years. Similar calculations applied to
the La Plata the Amazon, and the St.
Lawrence show that an average of 100
| tons to the square mile, per annum, are
removed from the whole American CONT
nent. This, it is stated, agrees with re
suits previously arrived at by Professor
ReaIe in respect TO Europe, from which
| it is inferred that the whole OF the land
draining into the Atlantic from America,
Africa, Europe and Asia, contributes mat
ter in solution which, if reduced to rock
at two tons to the cubic yard, would
equal one cubic mile every six years.