A new lead for deep sea sounding carries a cartridge which explodes on touching the bottom. A submerged microphone receives the sound and the depth is estimated from the time occupied by the lead in sinking to the bottom.
When leeches were kept in every chemist’s shop and often in private houses their behavior was subject to constant observation, and it was generally noticed that in still weather, dry or wet, they remained at the bottom, but rose, often as much as twenty-four hours in advance, before a change, and in case of a thunderstorm rose very quickly to the surface, descending when it was past.
Spiders are met with in the forests of Java whose webs are so strong that it requires a knife to cut through them. A spider weighing four pounds, which has taken up his residence in a cathedral at Munich, regales herself with a large supply of lamp oil. A Texas spider weaves a balloon four feet long and two feet wide, which she fastens to a tree by a single thread, then marches on board with her half dozen little ones, cuts the thread and away goes the airship to some far distant point on the prairie.
We have it on the authority of the Brooklyn Eagle that smoke never does issue from a volcano. Nor does fire. The red light seen above the crater is no flame. It is the glow of molten lava reflected on the under side of the clouts of dust and the clouds of dust are never mixed with smoke. There are bursts of steam sometimes, but rocks do no burn as wood does, and give off the finely-divided carbon dust that we know as smoke. The pictures of eruptions in the geographies of our youth are wrong, and so are reports from Prescott, Ariz., that smoke is issuing from one of the peaks of the Harque Hala range, thus indicating “that an active volcano is developing.”
A very curious phenomenon has been much commented upon in the German press, says the Philadelphia Record. Prof. K. G. Fiedler, who has been investigating the appearance of so-called fulgurites for many years, has recently received two specimens, which are the largest he has ever seen. Their origin is due to lightning striking a bank of sand. This actin of lightning is explained in the following way: The heat of the electric discharge melts the quartz to a fluid mass, which becomes solid after cooling off. The shape is very odd, branching and forking out, tapering toward the ends. These fulgurites are hollow their entire length, the forked ends pointing downward where found. They are from seven to nine feet long, and their ends reached into very wet sand, where all traces of lightning ceased.
[tags]Ann Arbor Register, October, 1895[/tags]
2 comments ↓
The leech item is interesting. Somewhere, years ago, perhaps in an old “things to do” style book, I’ve seen a description of how to make a leech weather-glass — IIRC, basically a leech in a jar. And its behaviour, as described above, was used to predict weather…
I thought I remembered such a thing, too, but I’ve read so much Victorian-era science miscellany that I can’t quite recall where.
There’s a description of one at the Museum of Hoaxes (said to be real; not a hoax), and there’s a mention of a “leech barometer” in Enquire Within upon Everything (number 968).