WONDERS OF ENERGY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LX, Issue 143976, 19 December 1912, Page 3

WONDERS OF ENERGY.

POWER OF SMALL ANIMALS. Prof. Mas Rubner, of the University of Berlin, tolls some facts that are stranger than fiction. These facts are about the extraordinary strength and energy of the minutest of living creatures. For example, the yeast germ, a being so small that it would take about a trillion of him to make up an ounce, works 157 times as hard as a horse. If a horse were made up of cells each as powerful as a yeast cell, ail working together as hard as these work to raise our bread, he could tow the Lusitania up the Hudson River against the tide. And a man similarly constructed could stand on the track and stop an express going at full speed. There are a few of the most minute creatures that cannot possibly be shown in graphic form. For example, the diphtheria bacillus, which is, about a micron in diameter —it would take 2,500,000 of him to make an inch—works 160 times as hard as the child whose body he is attacking. But the germs of the diphtheria anti-toxin work 170 times as hard as the child, and this is why, when they are injected into his blood, they conquer the diphtheria germs and the child gets well. , The earthwork works 390 times as hard as a.raan. If two men could work as hard as a worm they could dig the Panama Canal in a week. But there is a creature more energetic than even the worms, and it is one of man’s most deadly enemies—the germ of tuberculosis. In proportion to its size, it does work equivalent to that of 2198 horses. .

An ant carrying its egg up a stalk‘of grass is proportionately as strong as a man carrying a piano up a ladder. A squirrel’s day’s work would lift an elephant.

A new-born mouse expends enemy that would enable him, if big enough, to boat a man 1 in a race to Albany. ■

A stag hound exerts energy in a day’s hunt that would enable a man' to lift the AVoolworth Building. A canary’s day’s work would hold up a barrel of sugar. A flock of geese could tow an automobile all day.

If a man could jump like a flea, he could leap over the spire of Trinity Church, New York.

“I started with the simplest thing, a yeast germ,” says Prof. Rubner. “It has but one cell; a man has about four billion cells. I began my experiments with surface yeast because of the simplicity of its development. The methods I used are too complex for the layman to understand. But I con tell you this: that sugar is the source of the yeast cell’s energy.”