MINUTENESS OF ATOMS

Taranaki Daily News, 28 January 1933, Page 8

MINUTENESS OF ATOMS

SOME STRIKING EXAMPLES. Goldbeaters by hammering can reduce gold leaves so thin that 282,000 must be laid upon each other to produce the thickness of an inch. Yet the leaves are perfect and without holes so that one of them laid upon any' surface, as in gilding, furnishes the appearance. of solid gold. They are so thin, that, if formed into a book, 1500 would occupy only the space of a leaf of common paper; and an octavo volume of an inch thick would have as many pages as the books of a well-stocked ordinary library of 1500 volumes, with 400 pages in each. Still thinner is the coating of gold upon the silver wire of what is called gold lace.

Platinum and silver can be drawn into wire much finer than human hair. A grain of blue vitriol, or carmine, will tinge a gallon of water, so that in every drop the colour may be perceived. A grain of musk will scent a room for 20 years, and will lose little of its weight. The carrion crow smells its food many miles distant. A burning taper, uncovered for a single instant, during which it does not lose one thousandth of a grain, would fill with light a sphere four miles in diameter so as to be visible in every part of it. The thread of the silkworm is so small that many are twisted together to form our finest sewing thread. That of the spider is smaller still: two drams of it, by weight, would reach London to Edinburgh, or 400 miles. In the milt of a cod-fish, or in water in which vegetables have been infused, the microscope discovers animalcules, many thousands of which together do. not equal in bulk a grain of sand. Yet nature, with singular ‘prodigality, has supplied many with organs as complex as those of the whale or the elephant; and their bodies consist of the same substance, or ultimate atoms, as that of man. In a single pound of such matter there are more living creatures than there are human beings on the face of the globe.