SCIENTIFIC ITEMS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 368, 10 June 1911, Page 2

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS.

——.-♦ LIFE'S LIMITS. All indications point to the fact that less than ten miles below our feet a red heat is maintained permanently, and within twenty a white heat. Ten miles above us we have the pitiless cold, far below zero, of Interplanetary space. To what a narrow zone of delicately balanced temperature is life confined. WHAT WE ARE MADE OF. A chemical analysis of the human body results in some very interesting discoveries. We are told that a normal healthy man, weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, is the txact equivalent, chemically speaking, of cne thousand hens' eggs. He consists of thirty-eight quarts of water, which makes up over half his weight, sixty lumps of sugar, twenty spoonfuls of salt, iron enough to make seven good-sized spikes, two pounds of lime, thirty-five hundred cubic feet of gas. oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, over twenty pounds of carbon, or enough for about ten thousand lead-pencils, phosphorus enough for eight hundred thousand matches, and starch, sulphur, chloride of potash, and hydrochloric acid in lesser quantities. TELLS TIME THE WORLD OVER. The principal object of a recently designed clock described in the "Journal of the Royal Society of Arts," is to show at a glance the time all the world over. In front of it a disc is mounted, which revolves with the earth once in twenty-fours, having the hours 1 p.m. till 12 midnight, and 1 a.m. till 12 noon, painted on its outside edge, the hours being divided into intervals of five minutes each. In the same plane as the disc is a fixed dial, with a circular aperture to accomodate the disc. The dial has Greenwich painted c n top, the names of the other places being arranged at sach distances from Greenwich that at any moment the corresponding time for any part of the world is shown. The clock is set by turning a disc, so that the time at any place abroad at a given time in London, or other place, can be easily read off.

AN INTERESTING COMPARISON

The time which has elapsed since the first appearance of life on our earth has been variously estimated at 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 years. To tax our powers of comprehension as little as possible, Dr. H. Schmidt, of Jena, has taken the shortest estimate, and has tried to make understandable the five great evolutionary periods through which life has passed by comparing them with a day of twenty-four hours. This is the re-s-It : The Archeozoic period (52,000,COO years) is Represented by twelve hours thirty minutes ; Paleozoic (34,,000,000 years), eight hours seven nfinutes ; Mesozic (11,000,000 years), two hours thirty-eight minutes ; Cenozoic (3,000,000 years), fortythree minutes ; Anthropozoic (100,000 years), two minutes. If the last period, the age of man, be compared in its subdivisions by the same scale it is found that the "historic" portion covers only five seconds, and two seconds are sufficient for the Christian era.