TEMPERATURE OF STARS

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 5 June 1914, Page 2

TEMPERATURE OF STARS

The temperatures of seventy stars have been calculated by Dr. H.

Rosenberg, a German astronomer,

from comparisons of the differences of intensity in different portions of the sun's spectrum. One star, Gamma Pegasi, seems to have the inconceivable heat of more f than 400,000 deg. C. The next is much cooler, Gamma Cassiopeiae at 50,000 deg. ; but this is vastly hotter than Alpha Tauri, the coolest, at 2,150 deg. By the same scale of computation the temperature of our sun is found to be 4,950 deg. The hottest stars are the helium stars, and those showing bright hydrogen lines in their spectra.

effect. Only desperate men—ex-con-

victs, or their associates, members of the criminal family, egged on by their needs or their passions, and having nothing more to lose —become professional burglars. There are no amateurs. "Freaks" Mons Bertillon does not count. Their ill-conceived assaults upon society are, he admits, disconcerting, but they do' not constitute a permanent danger. '

To be a burglar you must be a " handy-man," with some technical ability. There is the thief who specialises in false-keys. He is al-

ways more or less of a locksmith. The coiner must understand the galvanoplastic casting of metals.

The use of the oxyhydric blowpipe for fusing the steel plates of a strongbox, the manipulation of the dyna-

mite cartridge, that "open sesame" to the most complicated of locks,

cannot be learned in a day. Technical schools for burglars not having yet been established, it is in the metallurgical factory, as a former

artisan, that the burglar has, as a

rule, acquired his knowledge

How did the "gentleman burglar" come to be invented ? To answer this question, we must go back to the period of social upheaval which at the and of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries accompanied and followed the great French Revolution. In the general confusion caused by the abdication of Napoleon, a most singular impostor arose. An escaped convict, named Cognard, famous even to this day, having murdered one of Napoleon's Generals, Comte de Sainte-Helene, and stolen his family papers, succeeded in impersonating his victim, installed himself in the murdered nobleman's house, was accepted at the War Office and at Court, and even held reviews of troops. But another escaped convict, who had been his chain companion at the hulks, recognised Cognard in the midst of his splendour, demanded hush-money, and enraged at his refusal, denounced the sham General to the Ministry of Justice. Cognard was sent back to the chain, and shortly afterwards died. Tlis adventures undoubtedly inspired Balzac with the immortal character of Vautrin, the enigmatical ex-con-vict, burglar, highwayman, and brilliant man of the world. All the "gentlemen burglars," who transmit such agreeable little sensations of imaginary fear through the nervous system of the modern novelreader, comfortably installed in an arm-chair, are, concludes Mons. Bertillon, the natural descendants of Vautrin, and are modelled on the same purely illusionary type. For whatever the fictitious ' Vautrin may have been in the imagination of Balzac, the real Cognard was, says our authority, certainly not a gentleman.—"Popular Science Sittings."

rain water. Prof. K. W. Charitakow has proved that the rays of the sun are capable of producing hydrogen peroxide by exposing moist porous substance* •to the sun in the presence of oxygen." So bleaching of linen on lawns is due to oxidising effect of the sun's rays.