The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1909-05-15

field Of low temperature has brought out many
new and startling facts. succeeded By cooling down
the rare gas helium, to the almost inconcelVable
temperature of 422 degrees below Fahrenheit 5
But this is not absolute zero and the problem
remains unsolved.
Here and there in rare corners of the earth, &c
centric men vet mix ingredients in crucibles seek
ing the philosophers stone"-that mysterious and
wonderful substance that will, they believe. when
found change the baser metals into gold. 1t never
will be found of course for such substance, in the
nature of things. can have no concrete existence
Yet for hundreds of years the best brains and keen
est intellects in Christendom have sought it early
and late. Nor were their labors wholly wasted tor
it was while searching for this mythical substance
that the secret of manufacturing porcelainGlauber
salts, gun powder. etc, was discovered. Glebcr
while working at it discovered the properties OF
acids. and Van Helmont the nature of gas.
After similar fashion, too. the three century
long hunt for the elixir of life" bequeathed to us
a whole host of valuable drugs, and was the means
indirectly of saving or, at all events. prolonging
millions of lives.
SO. also. as the result of the vain search after
perpetual notion there evolved the greatest
of all the gsneralizations of modern physical
science the principle of the conservation of energy,
and even now more or less important discoveries
are being constantly stumbled upon by seekers after
the same perennial w-o-the-wisp
No one has succeeded in extracting the square
root of ?. 1t was an interesting amusement OF
our tTignometry class. in our early college days. and
Franco German student named Froiscart sue
cecded in working it out to sixty places of decimas
IL LII l,o ttoClIN
insolvable problems. or rather figure problems
which have from time to time occupied the atten-
ton of mathematical cranks, the most famous is
that generally known "squaring the circle" The
time and energy wasted upon it in days gone by
are simply amazing. A Dutch professor of mathe-
MATES at the University of Heidelberg tackled 1t
for forty-three years His name was Jacob Mar
cells and he went crazy and hung himself.
The quadrature or "squaring of the circle
was. and may yet be, famous problem which has
probably been the subject of more discussion than
any other problem within the whole range OF mathe-
NAUTICAL science. The squaring would be possible II
an aleebrac expression with finite number OF
terms could be found for the length OF
the circumference of the circle. But such eX-
preston has been found or will, in all probability.
be found. If the line enclosing the circle were
stretched out straight and then made into square.
one would think the square would contain as much
as the circle. but it will not. And since on
the subject of strange problems. we may as we'll
mention here that in 1902 in St. Felix, small vii
age in the Department of Haute Garonne. France
there died Jean Vamont a wealthy horticuIturist
who spent 100000 and fortyfve years of his life in
.rying by artificial cultivation, to produce blue
rosa task impossible of accomplishment And
Why is it task impossible of accomplishment: Be
,ause. as the French chemist De Candolle has
pointed out yellow and blue the fundamental /
ypes of colors in flowers and these colors are an
agonistic and mutually exclude each other Vel
ow. by culture, may be changed into red or white,
,ut never into blue. On the other hand blue will [
ade into red. but never into yellow We have
,ellow rose but we cannot have blue