It is surely easy to understand that many such formulas might have been known and never hit upon since. The possibilities in the way of making alloys are endless, especially when it comes to using ingredients or reagents other than metals. It would be strange indeed if an industrious, highly intelligent, and very patient people, working for ages, inspired by enthusiastic motives, should not have discovered many things which are unknown to us whose history is so recent and whose records have been so largely concerned with less peaceful arts.
SCIENTIFIC ODDMENTS: by the Busy Bee
The largest flower in the world is said to be Rafflesia, a native of Sumatra. It is composed of five round petals of a brickish color, each measuring a foot across. These are covered with numerous irregular yellowish white swellings. The petals surround a cup nearly a foot wide, the margin of which bears the stamens. The cup is filled with a fleshy disk, the upper surface of which is covered with projections like miniature cows' horns. When empty, the cup will hold about twelve pints. The flower weighs about fifteen pounds, the petals being three-quarters of an inch thick.
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Quite a field of discovery lies open in connexion with photography by invisible light, for it can reveal objects whose existence was not suspected, especially on the moon and other celestial bodies. The photograph is taken through a quartz lens coated with silver, which is impenetrable to visible light but not to ultra-violet rays. White flowers come out black, and a glass porch looks as if made of sheet-iron. A man standing in the sunlight was seen to have no shadow, which shows that the ultra-violet rays do not come directly from the sun but are present in diffused light.
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It is often desirable, in delicate scientific measuring, to convey a cool beam of light to a small scale which is to be read; and one clever device for doing this is to send the light along a glass rod. It might be thought that the light would escape through the sides of the rod and that it would therefore be necessary to coat them with some opaque substance; but this is not the case. Light does not pass through glass when it strikes the glass very obliquely. If we look very obliquely at a sheet of glass, we do not see the objects on the other side of it, but we see the reflection of those on the same side as that from which we look; the glass acts as if it were silvered. This is what is known as "total reflection"; and in accordance therewith the beam cannot escape through the sides of the rod. Thus the rod acts like a tube along which the light, as though a fluid, runs; rather a suggestive fact in connexion with currents and transmission generally.
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