POPULAR SCIENCE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 113, 28 September 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

POPULAR SCIENCE

There are eighty thousand kinds of beetles. A scorpion was the first of known land animals. The moon is 238,000 miles away from the earth. Man at birth is the most helpless of all living things. At its nearest point, the sun is 01,2M.U00 miles from the earth. Mars, which scientists say is drying up, is older than our earth.. In thirty years the production of petroleum has increased nineteen times. Electricity is used for obtaining lime, soda and ammonia—from the air! Ants, in point of instinct, rank above all the animals save man himself. The controversy regarding Mars being an inhabited planet began in 1877. Sir Robert Ball calculates that in early times our tides were over six hundred feet high. ■Without the ceaseless labors of microbes our earth would be an uninhabited charnel-house. Eighty feet long and thirty feet high, the atlantosaurus was one of Britain's prehistoric animals. For arguing that our world is only one of many, Giordano Bruno was burned to death in Rome in 1000.

Russia, the United States, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and Burma are at present the principal oilfields of the world. In point of time Europe and America are nearer together now than London and Edinburgh were 200 years ago. Accumulated in the mines of the world there is enough coal to create fifteen billion horse-power for 12,000 years. The invetnion of a Birmingham engineer enables a passenger in the fastest train to talk with anyone on the telephone system. Professor Sir K. Ray Lankester calculates that, by research, prevention and cure, every epidemic disease could be abolished within the next fifty years.