About Su=spots and Animals.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 22 April 1910, Page 4

About Su=spots and Animals.

+ A distinguished European seienir.t, H. Simroth, has attempted to explain successive glacial periods and •liniatic alterations by changes of latitude caused hy a very slow oscillation of the earth, to the extent of ■thirty or forty degrees in each direction around its longest axis, which meets tho surface iai Ecuador and SmiKitn.l. Tho cause assumed by Simroth for the pemlulation is the oblique impact of a former satellite, coming from the west-south-west, upon the earth in tho region of tbb Soudan.

With this "peitdulation theory," : :.nys the Scientific American, is as■wciated the hypothesis that all animal life originated near tho tendecree meridian (the equator of the pcudulation axis) which passes through Central Europe and the Soudan, and one of its consequences is an intricate connection between sun-spots and the geographical distribution of animals. Such a connection has long been assumed to exist (in regard to visitations of locusts, for example), but tho assumption has found favour with few zoologists. According to theory, the period of fluctuation in animal life should be the mean sun-spot period of eleven years, although the interval which actually intervenes between successive sun-spots maxima varies from six to seventeen years. Tn the equatorial phase of pendulation, through which Europe is now passing, various organisms return both from the east and from the west. In 1907, in accordance with the theory, many species of animals appeared in unaccustomed places or in unusually largo numbers. The following examples, with many others, are mentioned by Simroth in a recent article. Siberian pine-jays flocked into Germany in great numbers in 1907, as they had done in 189IJ. The cause commonly assumed for tho migration of these birds is a failure of the Siberian crop of pine nuts, which are their principal food. Simroth, on the contrary, attributes the migration to increase in the number of birds, resulting from an unusually abundant crop of pine nuts in the preceding year. In support of this view, he' cites tho very heavy crop of seed produced by German conifers in. 19(H), and the remarkably large numbers, of squirrels senn in 1907. Asiatic prairie hens also appeared in Europe in 1907. Their last previous appearance was in 1888, approximately two sun-spots periods earlier. In 1907 the woodwork of the Nat tonal Museum in Washington was seriously injured by tei-mites. A similar attack bad been made eleven or twelve years before. In the spring of 1908 about fifteen thousand pounds of shad were taken from a, Prussian lake, wlrich had yielded an equally surprising harvest in 1897. In 1907 huge swarms of wasps, thistle moths, and dragon flies appeared in Germany and locusts in Hungary. Simroth attributes to sun spots evem the unusual numbers of the white variety of the common great slug.