Troy weekly news. (Troy, Idaho) 1897-1933, 1905-12-22
PoPuls.d9!'S ienoe.



The new method Of producing gen.
raj anesthesia proposed by Schneider
n, Of Berlin, consists in, giving three
ypodermic injections-two hours. ons
our and half an hour before opera
ion-of scopolamine with some NOR
ihine. Unconsclousness continues
some hours after the operation.
The British birth rate has been
steadily declining IN recent years and
he latest report shows the lowest rate
IN record-twenty-s per one thou
sand for London and 29.2 per one
thousand for seventy-fve large towns
This scarcely exceeds the death rate
which must become the greater within
4 few years. Sanitation has reduced
he death rate, particularly among in
fants; this alone has postponed the be-
ginning of race decline beyond the
present time. The falling off in the
birth rate-due partly to selhshness
and love of pleasure and partly to our
strenuous modern living-is most serl-
Gus among the middle and upper
classes.
New England fishermen sometimes
find floating on the surface of the sea
an object which they have, with rare
descriptive force, named 1.-THE purple
veil" Twenty or thirty feet long by
four or five wide, it resembles. says a
writer in the National Geographic
Magazine, lady's veil, of gigantic size
and of violet or purple color. Pro-
fessor Spencer f. Baird found that It
consists of a transparent membrane.
and that the purple spots are formed
by innumerable embryonic fish en-
bedded in little cells. These, and
there may be as many as a million In
a single well" develop into the well.
known angler or goosefsh. One of
these huge wells full of eggs is the
product OF single adult fish. which
rarely exceeds three feet in length.
The storage of heat from the sun,
first pointed out by Kalescinsky in
1901 in some small salt lakes of Hun
gary, has now been observed In salt
lakes of various parts of Europe and
in Siberia. In the Szovata lakes.
warm layer several yards thick, was
found between two cooler layers. and
a condition Of the heating is the exist
ence of layer of fresh or diluted salt
water over the notwithstanding layer.
Even fresh water will be heated I'M
der covering of oil. The stored heat
sometimes rises to $50 degrees F., and
may be retained for considerable
time, and in a lake of Norway Il
proved destructive to oysters until the
cold water was let in from the open
sea. Artificial solutions of various
salts may be made to serve like the
salt lakes as heat accumulators.
Now that the Isthmus of Panama is
about to be pierced with a canal,
which will form a waterway for ma
rine life as we'll as for ships between
the two oceans, the need of biological
survey of the fresh waters of this 18TH
mus is suggested as a proper subject
for the attention Of Congress. One
problem for which a solution is sought
is that of the connection between the
freshwater fauna of the Atlantic and
the Pacific slopes of the isthmus.
There are indications that the fishes
of the Pacific slope streams crossed
the divide from the Atlantic slope in
times much more recent than that Of
the interoceanic connection which, it
is believed, once existed at Panama.
The completion Of the canal before the
making Of the proposed biological sur
vey would obscure the problem by
producing an artificial mingling of the
faunas Of the two slopes.