The first section of the electric railway up the Jungfrau, which is intended to reach the top of the mountain, was opened about the first of October, 1898. The line starts from the Little Scheidegg station of the existing Wengern Alp Railway, 6,770 feet above the sea, and ascends the mountain masses from the north side, passing the Eiger Glacier, Eiger Wand, Eismeer, and Jungfraujoch stations, to Lift, 13,430 feet, whence the ascent is completed by elevator to the summit, 13,670 feet. The road starts on a gradient of ten per cent, which is increased to twenty per cent about halfway to the Eiger Glacier station, and to twenty-five per cent, the steepest, after passing that station. There are about 85 yards in tunnel on the section now opened, but beyond the Eiger Glacier the road will not touch the surface except at the stations. About 250 yards of the long tunnel have been excavated so far. The stations beyond Eiger Wand will be built within the rock, and will be furnished with restaurants and beds. At the Eiger Wand and Eismeer stations passengers will contemplate the view through windows or balconies from the inside; but at the Jungfraujoch station tourists will be able to go out and take sledges for the great Aletsch Glacier. The cars will accommodate forty passengers each, and the company expects to complete the railroad by 1904.
Alexander A. Lawes, civil engineer, of Sydney, Australia, suggests a plan of mechanical flight on beating wings as presenting advantages that transcend all other schemes. He believes that the amount of power required to operate wings and the difficulty in applying it are exaggerated beyond all measure. The wings or sustainers of the bird in flight, he urges, are held in the outstretched position without any exertion on its part; and many birds, like the albatross, sustain themselves for days at a stretch. "This constitutes its aërial support, and is analogous to the support derived by other animals from land and water." The sole work done by the bird is propulsion and elevation by the beating action of the wings. Mr. Adams's machine, which he does not say he has tried, is built in conformity to this principle, and its sails are modeled as nearly as possible in form and as to action with those of the bird. The aid of an air cylinder is further called in, through which a pressure is exerted balancing the wings. The wings are moved by treadles, and the author's picture of the aëronaut looks like a man riding an aërial bicycle.
Carborundum, a substance highly extolled by its manufacturers as an abrasive, is composed of carbon and silicon in atomic proportions—thirty parts by weight of carbon and seventy of silicon. It is represented as being next to the diamond in hardness and as cutting emery and corundum with ease, but as not as tough as the diamond. It is a little more than one and a fifth times the weight of sand, is infusible at the highest attainable heat, but is decomposed in the electric arc, and is insoluble in any of the ordinary solvents, water, oils, and acids, even hydrofluoric acid having no effect upon it. Pure carborundum is white. In the commercial manufacture the crystals are produced in many colors and shades, partly as the result of impurities and partly by surface oxidation. The prevailing colors are green, black, and blue. The color has no effect upon the hardness. Crude carborundum, as taken from the furnace, usually consists of large masses or aggregations of crystals, which are frequently very beautifully colored and of adamantine luster.
A peculiarity of Old English literary usage is pointed out by Prof. Dr. L. Kellner, of Vienna, as illustrated in a sentence like "the mob is ignorant, and they are often cruel." This is considered a bad solecism in modern English, but in Old and Middle English constructions of exactly the same kind are so often met with that it is impossible to account for them as slips and mistakes. They may be brought under several heads, as, Number (the same collective noun used as a singular and a plural); Case (the same verb or adjective governing the genitive and accusative, the genitive and dative, or the dative and accusative); Pronoun ("thou" and "ye" used in addressing the same person); Tense (past and perfect, or past and historical present used in the same breath); Mood (indicative and subjunctive used in the same clause). Finite verb and infinitive dependent on the same verb; simple and prepositional infinitives dependent on the same verb; infinitive and verbal noun used side by side; different prepositions dependent on the same verb, like Caxton's "He was eaten by bears and of lions"; direct and indirect speech alternating in the same clause. These facts, which are met with as late as 1611 (Bible, authorized version), point to the conclusion that what to us appears as a grammatical inconsistency was once considered a welcome break in the monotony of construction.
Mr. Fischer Sigwart is quoted in the Revue Scientifique as having studied the life of frogs for thirty years, and found that they are night wanderers, keeping comparatively quiet during the day and seeking their prey after dark. In the fall they leave their hunting grounds in the fields and woods and take refuge near swamps and ponds, passing the winter in the banks of rivers or the mud in the bottoms of ponds, whence they come out in the spring, when the process of reproduction begins. The frog is not sexually mature till it is four or five years old. The coupling process lasts from three to thirty days. Between its spring wakening and spawning the frog eats nothing except, perhaps, its own skin, which it moults periodically. After spawning, frogs leave the water and go to the fields and woods. They can be fed, when kept captive, upon insects and earthworms.
NOTES.
A relation has been discovered by Professor Dolbear and Carl A. and Edward A. Bessey between the chirping of crickets and the temperature, the chirps increasing as frequently as the temperature rises. The Besseys relate, in The American Naturalist, that when, one cool evening, a cricket was caught and brought into a warm room, it began in a few minutes to chirp nearly twice as rapidly as the out-of-door crickets, and that its rate very nearly conformed to the observed rate maintained other evenings out of doors under the same temperature conditions.
C. Drieberg, of Colombo, Ceylon, records, in Nature, a rainfall at Nedunkeni, in the northern province of Ceylon, December 15 and 16, 1897, of 31.76 inches in twenty-four hours. The highest previous records, as cited by him, are at Joyeuse, France, 31.17 inches in twenty-two hours; Genoa, 30 inches in twenty-six hours; on the hills above Bombay, 24 inches in one night; and on the Khasia Hills, India, 30 inches in each of five successive days. The average annual rainfall at Nedunkeni has been 64.70 inches, but in 1897 the total amount was 121.85 inches. The greatest annual rainfall is on the Khasia Hills, India, with 600 inches. The wettest station in Ceylon is Padupola, in the central province, with 230.85 inches as the mean of twenty-six years, but in 1897 the amount was 243.07 inches.
The Korean postage stamps are printed in the United States. As explained in the United States consular reports, they are of four denominations, and all alike except in color and denomination. Of the inscriptions, the characters on the top are ancient Chinese, and those at the bottom, having the same meaning, are Korean; the characters on the right are Korean and those on the left are Chinese, both giving the denominations, with the English translation just below the center of the stamp. The plum blossom in each corner is the royal flower of the present Ye dynasty, which has been in existence more than five hundred years, and the figures at the corners of the center piece represent the four spirits that stand at the corners of the earth and support it on their shoulders. The national emblem in the center is an ancient Chinese phallic device.
A paragraph in La Nature calls to mind that the year 1898 was the "jubilee" of the sea serpent, the first mention of a sight of the monster—whether fabulous or not is still undecided—having been made by the captain and officers of the British ship Dædalus in 1848. They said they saw it between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, and that it was about six hundred feet long. Since then views of sea serpents have been reported nearly every year, but none has ever been caught or seen so near or for so long a time as to be positively identified. There are several creatures of the deep which, seen for an instant, might be mistaken with the aid of an excited imagination for a marine serpent; and it is not wholly impossible that some descendants of the gigantic saurians of old may still be living in the ocean undetected by science.