Scientific Scraps.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 100, 2 May 1885, Page 4

Scientific Scraps.

[n the spermaceti whale the teeth are fixed to tho gum. The bumble-bee molts at least ten times before arriving at the winged state. Pr. Klezko of Vienna has suggested the use of petroleum or paraffine as a powerful preventive of cholera. Paper labels for acid bottles should be fastened on with strong glue and afterward smoked with melted paraffine. The camphor laurel, a native of China, and the tree from which most of tho cam* phar of commerce is obtained, has been successfully introduced into California. Cryolite, a mineral which is of great value in the potash manufacture, has been discovered in the Yellowstone Park. Heretofore it has been obtained only in Greenland. Scorpions and spiders properly feed upon the juices of their victims, after lacerating fchem with their jaws, yet fragments of insects have been sometimes found in their stomachs. At a meeting of the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, Professor Lundstrom exhibited a fossil scorpion recently found near Wisby, in the Silurian formation of Gotland, and remarkable as the most ancient of an air-breathing animal at present discovered. The light emitted by insects, when examined under the spectroscope, is very beautiful, but is without dark or bright bands. When the intensity diminishes the red and orange rays disappear and the spectrum is reduced to yellow and green rays. A meteor which was seen to fall near Odessa was found by a peasant and proved to be a shapeless mass of about eighteen pounds. There is very little known as to the nature or causes of meteors, despite the annual recurrence and observation of them I in November*