Entries from February 2006 ↓

Beneath the peninsula of Lower Michigan there are brines and sheets of mineral water lying in basin form, and very rich in salt, bromides, etc., and of great medical and commercial value. They have been reached by numerous wells which run down to about 3,000 feet near the center of the basin, as at Alma and Bay City. The water comes up from the bottom of these wells hot (over 90 degrees), showing a decidedly more rapid increase in temperature than in the copper mines. But the famous Comstock lode, where fabulous wealth lured the miners on, showed perhaps the most rapid increase in temperature that man has ever dared to face. It was, however, doubtless due to the action of hot waters rising from still greater depths–probably the same waters that deposited the silver ores, still at work. In the mines of this region the miners, naked as savages, reeking with perspiration, drinking pailful after pailful of ice water (twenty tons of ice, or, in another case, ninety-five pounds per man, were used each day), could labor but ten minutes at the drift (in imminent danger of being scalded by striking a stream of hot water) before being overcome by heat and reeling to a cooler place. Fainting, delirium, even death have been the effect of the reaction on coming to the surface. Verily the Cuban proverb, that a Yankee would be found to go after a sack of coffee though it were at the gates of hell, was not far from the literal truth.

However, the rate of increase of temperature may vary, all indications thus agree that less than ten miles below us a red heat is attained and within twenty a white heat. Think of it! Ten miles below us it is red hot. Ten miles above we have the pitiless cold, far below zero, of interplanetary space. To what a narrow zone of delicately balanced temperature is life confined!

Some years ago a German of the name of Dase exhibited his wonderful powers of calculation and memory before the Queen. I once met him at the house of a friend, but unfortunately arrived to late to witness more than a few of his feats. Sixty-four figures were chalked upon a board, at which Mr Dase gave what I thought to be a cursory glance, and, immediately turning his back upon them, he stated the order in which they were placed, and repeated them backward. He was then, without altering his position, dodged by one of the company, who asked, “What is the twenty-third figure?” He answered at once, and correctly. Again, a vast amount of dominoes–I wondered where they got so many–were distributed on the table among several ladies, who arranged them in squares of various dimensions, while Mr. Dase stood with back to the table. He was then requested to turn round, and in an incredibly short space of time he told us the number, not of the dominoes, but of the spots. Thus far the evidence of my own eyes and ears. For the rest, I was told he can multiply in his mind 100 figures by the like number. He is an hour about it, but he result is always correct. I was told that he could extract the square root of one hundred given numbers in fifty-two minutes.–University Magazine.

Not a very active poster at the best of times, you might have noticed I’ve slowed down quite a bit lately. I have been distracted, I admit it! I’ve been working on a new blog-like thing, Bookp(h)ile. There I’ll keep track of the progress of the books I’ve got going at Distributed Proofreaders, the open clearances I have for Project Gutenberg, as well as listing books I’m planning on submitting to PGDP.

Things here at Odd Ends won’t change much, except eventually I’ll be removing the In Progress list. And maybe changing the theme, because I really like the one I have at Bookp(h)ile.

Thanks for your patience!

The idea that the hair snakes come from hairs thrown into water, is much more universal than you may suppose. It was only the other day that a lady was talking with the Professor:

“You needn’t tell me that it isn’t so, because I’ve pulled hairs out of my own head and put them in water, and have seen them turn into snakes before my own eyes.”

What could a poor Professor say? For, of course, he didn’t believe her for a minute. She may have seen the hairs move with the motion of the water, and so made up her mind that they must have turned to snakes. You may feel very sure, however, that no hair put into water ever became a snake. In fact the so-called hair-snake is only a worm. You will find it at certain seasons of the year in small pools of water and even on wet or damp cabbages.

Examine one through a microscope and you will see that it has little rings around its long, slender body. It is what scientific books call an annulated worm.

There is one very strange thing about these creatures; they are never still, but constantly wriggling about. Neither do they stretch themselves to their full length when on the ground, but curl themselves up in some way or other.

You have seen an ordinary earth worm crawling into his hole, and have noticed that he pulls his body in almost a straight line; but when the hair worm creeps, his body is generally in the form of a semi-circle.

You remember the notices in the paper about a great “shower of snakes” in Memphis, Tenn., a year ago last winter. These were our hair worms; and, as they were found only in one place in the city, scientific men thought that the heavy storm must have blown and washed them from some neighboring pool or garden.

For such little fellows they seem to be just crowded with life, it being comparatively difficult to kill them when in water.–Christian Union.

Mrs Whittelsey’s Magazine for Mothers and Daughters, Volume 3 (1852). Abigail Goodrich Whittelsey (1788-1858) edited several periodicals with names similar to this one. Her brother was “Peter Parley.”

This is a rather religious periodical full of advice to young mothers, some reprinted from other works, some original.

Some, however, sounds familiar…

THE STUPID, DULL CHILD.

There is always great danger of wounding the sensibilities of a timid, retiring child. It requires great forbearance and discrimination on the part of parents and teachers, in their endeavors to develop the latent faculties of the minds of such children, (whether this dullness is natural, or the effect of untoward circumstances,) without injuring the sensibilities of the heart.

This is especially true at the present day, when the world is laying such heavy demands upon the time and attention of parents. We not unfrequently hear a father confessing, with regret, to be sure, but without any apparent endeavors to obviate the evil, that his time and thoughts are so absorbed in the cares of his business, that his little children scarcely recognize him, as he seldom returns to his family, till they are in bed, and goes forth to his business before they are up in the morning.

Thanks to Josephine Paolucci for Post-processing this periodical!

Christmas Stories and Legends, compiled by Phebe A. Curtiss. Published 1916, it includes twenty contemporary (in 1916) stories of Christmas.

Thanks to Stacy Brown Thellend for Post-processing this book!

It has been a life-work of more than one to devise a mode of accounting for the world we are in with no agency of any intelligent power above nature, or with as little as possible. This is done, of course, “in the pure interests of science;” at any rate all desire of advocating atheism is disavowed. Some who labor in this line are naturalists; more are not. When the anonymous Vestiges of Creation appeared, the book was received as the work of some profound student of the natural sciences. But the zoologist wished he had known more of zoology; the botanist wondered at his botanical mistakes; and so through the circle. All found him weakest where they themselves were strongest. And the book, which was a nine-days’ wonder, has exerted no permanent influence on either natural history or theology.

It is a little remarkable to see a metaphysician like Herbert Spencer volunteering his aid in generalizing the truths which the botanists and zoologists have discovered, and which they are still tracing out to new discoveries. Is it that he supposes their minds so cramped by their investigations that they cannot or dare not go on to general principles? The amount of acute reasoning that has been expended on the flower of an orchis [sic] or a silkweed, is little suspected by most who are familiar with the subtleties involved in the consideration of an abstruse point in law. Men like Robert Brown and Richard Owen may be safely left to their own work. Nou tali auzilio. We know that there has been men who compiled an Encyclopaedia professedly out of zeal for the diffusion of knowledge, while among themselves they did not hesitate to avow it as the great task of their lives “to crush the wretch;” and that “wretch” was Jesus of Nazareth!

But we have less to do with the motives of Herbert Spencer than with his assumptions and conclusions. And in the outset let it be understood that they refute none of the teachings of the Bible. Could he but find evidence for them he would weaken certain arguments in natural theology, and take off something from the palpable absurdity of every atheistic scheme, but nothing more. It would remove certain results from the immediate to the mediate agency of the divine Contriver. The man who lets loose the ferret against the rats sends his design far beyond where his hands can reach. The zoologist who lays the head of a bird on an anthill uses the voluntary agency of other beings to free the bones form [sic] putrescible [sic] matters.

So, if it be not absurd to thank God for any event whereat we rejoice, how shall we limit his indirect agency? It may be that there is a sense in which he made the Pyramids and the Crystal Palace. And no one can prove that it is beyond the reach of Omniscience to wind up a machine as complicated as this world, so that each casual cog shall mesh in with one of effect even to the determination of where each leaf shall fall in all the life of every primeval forest. And intelligent beings might form part of the vast machine, seemingly as free in their agency as are the bees that swarm into the empty hive which their owner has made fragrant with hickory leaves. This is not our chosen way of explaining what we see, but it is less preposterous than a complicated code of self-enacted laws, and an eternal series of organic beings, which down to this winter, is seen to be in full career of rapid progress. But this interpretation of the Creator’s work excites the same disappointment as if what is treasured as an autograph should proved not a forgery, but the writing of an amanuensis. God is still the author of nature.

Our positive philosopher is very positive in his assertions. The patient naturalist who has sacrificed thousands of eggs in investigating the steps by which the yolk is developed into a chick, does not speak with more confidence of his conclusions from comparison of different eggs of the same hen at known intervals in the process of incubation, than our author does of the development of one species into another, assuming that unknown ages are competent to produce the change. But his whole scheme is unsupported by a single animal change that can be proved outside of human influences.

At the first glimpse any positive evidence of secular change in species might appear unattainable. It is not so. The entire history of many a species, from its origin to its extinction, can be studied in the strata of rock that were formed in part of their remains. None of them began in any other species, none ended in another. So far then as facts are concerned, the geographical discoveries of Lemuel Gulliver are on a level with the biological science of Herbert Spencer.

It is the first step that costs. The benighted traveler often has found as much difficulty in securing the first faint flame as in making all the rest of his watch fie. “Protoplasm, manifesting life, and yet showing no signs of organization,” is his starting point. Where do we find it? Who has seen it? Does it belong to the organic world–without organization? We wish to know more about this life without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life. Is its life that of a crystal? Or is it merely geometricity, like the movements of animated oats, or the rose of Jericho? It is certainly a pity that this important abutment, whence the flying bridge must start, was not made firm beyond a peradventure. True it is sufficient that the protoplasm should have lived seventy million years ago. But are not the causes which then originated it still in action? Its very next door neighbors, protophytes and protozoa, are now by no means scares nor is their existence problematical. Strange that this protoplam should be so little known!

From these simple living cells, the theorist’s course in comparatively easy. Each living thing is an assemblage of facts; the prototype of scores, the humming bird of thousands or millions. A very skil[l]ful selection and arr[a]ngement is made of many that carry conviction with them. Grand that the Creator did make protoplasm and no other living thing, that he further enacted a complicated code of laws that execute themselves in some incomprehensible ways, and the order of being and development, may as well be, as Mr. Spencer would have it, as in any other way.

But that wonderful code of laws! Here are the yolks of two eggs. One is from the nest of an eagle, there other from that of a grouse. They are almost a liquid, but are, in fact, a conglomeration of delicate cells. But of course thee can be no very essential difference between them. The anatomist can find none at all. Outside influences must determine the shape of the creatures to come from them. No so. From one shall be developed a fierce eye, a hooked beak, and terrible talons; from the others a timid, defenseless bird. Nay, more; the offspring shall bear individual resemblance, not only to the parent within whose body its original substance took shape, but also to another parent with whom its connection must have been infinitesimal. The atheistic philosopher would have it that all the causes of these developments were wrapped up in that semi-fluid globe which cannot even keep its shape when laid on a plate. All the markings of a million of feathers in the egg of a peahen! For an uncreated law this is indeed wonderful–incredible.

But the development theory implies that accidental differences between parent and offspring may be perpetuated to succeeding generations. If any such peculiarity favor fecundity, tenacity of life, facility of securing food or escaping from enemies, it increases the number of descendants; and if the contrary, it diminishes the number of the survivors. And when the law of the survival of the fittest shall have culminated in an omnivorous animal of the size of the whale, that can leap as many times its length as a flea, with the cuirass of the crocodile, the tenacity of life of the tortoise, capable of outflying the condor and outswimming the salmon, as prolific as the rab[b]it, as cunning as the fox, with the intellectual power of Aristotle, the pertinacity of Grand, the eloquence of Demosthenes and the piety of Brainard, this globe will have reached maturity. We do not understand why this has not happened may millions of years since.

The absence of this all-prevailing supremus is not the only thing inexplicable in our theory. Of plants there should be just as many species as there are combinations of temperature, soil, moisture and other modifying circumstances; and, as two climates shade into each other, so should every two neighboring species. It should be as impossible to arrange them into distinct species as to classify absolutely the lumps of coal in a bin.

And there are some special difficulties. Does the working-bee transmit no sterility to her offspring? Ad did she inherit it from her prolific royal mother? The worker-ant is a similar puzzle. A still more remarkable one is the honey-making ant of Mexico. Certain neutrals secrete hone till they become shapeless living honey-bags. These the rest of the colony regularly destroy for food when other supplies fail. But their parents had no such peculiarity, and they transmit it to no descendants. By what modification of her wondrous law of descent–partus NON sequiter ventrem–is this peculiarity of the aunts transmitted to their nieces? Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in arranging the animal creation into groups and imaginary series, each species of which might look like an improvement on the one supposed to have preceded it. But he makes no effort to prove that these species came into existence in any such order. And just here the facts are dead against him. For, granting that the creation of the present world was simultaneous, there is no question previous worlds had existed on this globe: they were furnished with life very different from ours. But it is far from true that there can be perceived any course of improvement from the “‘prentice hand” to the wonderful perfection ultimately displayed. The very reverse might be shown with much more plausibility.

The earliest of animals known till lately was a shell-fish called lingula prima. But it was not a poor helpless thing like the oyster. The Brachopods[sic], of which it was one, is the highest of mollusks, and after a wide prevalence in successive worlds is now almost extinct. The first reptiles that lived on this globe were not limbless snakes doomed to wriggle and crawl as they might, but mighty lizards before whom our creation would tremble. They walked, they swam, they flew. Birds to which the ostrich was but a chicken, have left their tracks in the sandstone. The elephant genus once traversed the snows of Siberia and Alaska; now it is reduced to two tender species in India and Africa. In short, it appears rather as if this globe had been spectator of successive interferences of creative power, as each organic form waxed old and ready to vanish away. And in each we love to trace, not the result of blind animal antagonism, but the mind of a Creator, a revelation of God to man. God grant that we read not the book of revelation in vain!–Zion’s Herald.

One of the most interesting items that we have learned from the whale men who have cruised the Arctic ocean the past summer, is the discovery of extensive land in the middle of that ocean, which may yet prove to be a polar continent. The existence of this land has long been known, but owing to the impassible ice barriers along its shores, of its extent and character nothing very definite has been known until this season. Baron Wrangell, the famous Russian explorer, first communicated to the world the knowledge of its existence as he learned it from the Siberian Indians, and it is simply marked on most Arctic charts, “extensive highlands.” It should be stated that the past summer has been the mildest and most favorable for whaling ever known by our oldest whalemen. One master says that he did not see a piece of ice as large as his hand till he reached the Straits, and even beyond that, up to 72 degrees the sea was generally free from floating ice. The weather, for the most part, haas been exceedingly mild, with southerly winds prevailing, which tended to meld the ice or drive it northward. As a result of the favorable state of the ocean and weather the ships have gone further north this summer than ever before, some having reached as high as 73 degrees 30 minutes.

Captain Long, of the bark Nile, who seems to have examined the land attentively, having cruised along the entire southern coast, has drawn a sketch of its appearance. It is quite elevated, and near the centre has an extinct crater cone, which he estimated at 2,480 feet high. He named Wrangell’s Lank, after the noted Russian explorer. The west point he named Cape Thomas, after the seaman on his ship who discovered it, and the southeast point Cape Hawaii. The names given by Capt. Long are so exceedingly appropriate that we doubt not geographical societies in Europe and America will adopt them, and call this land Wrangell’s Land. Captain Long has prepared for us an account of this interesting discovery, which we insert here:

Honolulu, Nov. 5, 1867.

Sir: During my cruise in the Arctic Ocean this season, I saw land not laid down on any chart that I have seen. The land was first seen from the bark Nile on the evening of the 14th of August, and the next forenoon at 9:30 the ship was eighteen miles distant from the west point of the land. I had good observations this day, and made the west point to be in latitude 70 degrees and 40 minutes north, and in longitude 170 degrees and 30 minutes east.–The lower part of the land was entirely free from snow, and had a green appearance, as if covered with vegetation. There was broken ice between the ship and land, but as there were no indications of whales, I did not feel justified in endeavoring to work through it and reach the shore, which I think I could have done without much danger. We sailed to the eastward along the land during the 15th, and part of the 16th, and in some places approached it as near as 15 miles.

On the 16th the weather was very clear and pleasant, and we had a good view of the middle and eastern portion of the land. Near the centre, or about in longitude 180 degrees, there is a mountain which has the appearance of and extinct volcano. By approximate measurement I found it to be 2,480 feet high. I had excellent observation on the 16th, and made the southeastern cape, which I have named Cape Hawaii, to be in latitude 70 degrees 40 minutes north, and 178 degrees 15 minutes west. It is impossible to tell how far this land extends northward, but as far as the eye could reach we could see ranges of mountains until they were lost in the distance; and I lear from Captain Biven, of the ship Nautilus, that he saw land northwest of Herald Island, as far north as latitude 72 degrees.

The first knowledge of the existence of this land was given to the civilized world by Lieutenant Ferdinand Wrangell, of the Russian navy (who I find in 1740, was an admiral in the same service). In his expedition from Nishne Kolymsk, in the consecutive years from 1820 to 1824, he obtained information from the Techuktsch that in clear days in the summer season, they could see land north from Cape Jakan.

From the appearance of this land as we saw it, I feel convinced that it is inhabited, as there were large numbers of walrus in this vicinity, and the land appeared more green than the main coast of Asia, and quite as capable of supporting man as the coast from Point Harrow to the Mackenzie river, or the northern parts of Greenland, which are in a much higher latitude. There is a cape a little to the Westward of Cape Jakan, which has a very singular appearance. On the summit and along the slopes of this promontory there is an immense number of upright and prostrate columns some having the appearance of pyramids, others like obelisks, some of them with the summit larger than the base. The character of the surrounding country, which was rolling with no abrupt declivities, made these objects appear more singular. They were not in one continuous mass, but scattered over a large surface, and in clusters of fifteen or twenty yards, with intervals of several hundred yards between them.

While at anchor near this place, Captain Philips of the Monticello, came on board, and drew my attention to a large black place on the slope of one of the hills, and said he thought it was coal. It glistened in the sun, and appeared like a large surface which had been used as s deposit for coal. It was about one and a half miles in length and on-half mile in breadth, the country surrounding that being covered with vegetation. From 170 east, there were no indications of animal life in the water. We saw no seals walrus, whales, or animalculae in it. It appeared almost as blue as it does in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, although there was but from fifteen to eighteen fathoms of water in any place within forty miles of the land. I think the position I have assigned to this land will be found correct as Mr. Flitner examined my chronometer on my arrival and found it only one and a half miles in error.

I have named this northern land Wrangell’s Land as an appropriate tribute to the memory of the man who spent three consecutive years north of latitude 66 degrees and demonstrated the problem of this open Polar Sea, forty-five years ago, although others of much later date, have endeavored to claim the merit of this discovery. The west cape of this land I have named Cape Thomas, from the man who first reported the land from the masthead of my ship, and the southeastern cape I have named after the largest island in this group. As this report has been hurriedly prepared, I would wish to make more extended observations on the subject, which may be of benefit of other cruisers in this direction, if you will allow me room in your paper on some future occasion.

Yours, very truly,

Thomas Long.