Science Sittings

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 35, 31 August 1905, Page 29

Science Sittings

By »Vo!t»

Land Basins. The ocean Jhasins and the land basins— the latter being regions without any surface flow of water toward the sear-are shown in a hydrographic chart lately prepared by a Swiss geographer. The greatest region without a flow seaward extends from the neighborhood of the Baltic Sea through Russia and Cbntral Asia nearly to the Yellow Sea ; and a smaller closed basin embraces part of Asia Minor and Arabia. Africa has three such basins, Australia has one, including its western part, North America has four—two east of the continental divide at the latitude of the Gulf of California, and two others more to the north and to the west of the divide. South America has two closed basins in the region of the Cordilleras. Giant Trees. The distinction of Weing the oldest living thing undoubtedly belongs to some giant tree, and many attempts to locate it and determine its age have been made. A century ago De Candolle found two yewsone at Fortingal, in Perthshire, and one at Hedsor, in Bucks— that were estimated to be respectively 2500 and 3240 years- old. Both are still flourishing, and the older tree has a trunk 27 feet in diameter. A gigantic baobab of Central America, with a trunk 20 feet through, was thou'gjht Jbj7 Humboldt to be not less than 5150 years old. Mexican botanists believe they have now discovered a life-span even greater than this, and from the annual rings a cypress of Chepultepec, whose trunk is 118 feet in circumference, is assigned an age of about 6200 years. The Fuel of the Future. This name is given by ' Popular Mechanics ' to compressetd bri^ettes of peat. One-seventh of the area of Ireland, it says, consists of peat bog, at present unprofitable, tint soon to be worth as much as so many coal-mines, owing to improved and cheapened methods of collecting, drying, and preparing poat for fuel. Even now Sweden uses 2,000,000 tons of peat briquettes yearly, while within 50 miles of Chicago are unused fields of the substance containing enough to supply, that city for a century. Of a new method of preparation the writer says :— ' In this new process the peat is excavated by machinery, and conveyed directly to the plant without the long delay of air-crying. Here it is packed into rotary cylinders, which are revolved at great speed, the peat being beaten by an interior heating device while the cylinders rotate. The centrifugal force expels the moisture, so that it is a very low percentage. Then, by means of electrodes connected by conductors with a dynamo, the centrifugally dried peat is included in an electric circuit ; the resistance of the peat generates heat, and it is carbonised. A mass of black globules represents the results and retains all the valuable properties of the raw mate-rial. It then passes to kneading machi^ies, aJnd after being 1 well kneaded it is either moulded into briquettes or left to dry and harden, in which latter case it is afterwards broken, screened, and graded. 1 As "has 'bfen stated, the value of this process lies greatly in the fact that in climates where the drying season is short it can be prepared despite the weather conditions. In Alaska a supply could hardly be'prepared after other methods, and what a boon prepared peat fuel would be in that climate ! It is a fact that the peat supply increases proportionately with the distance from the efqiuator, and, ufriider the eternal law of compensation, there must be some means by which it can \ye utilised in those cold countries where it abounds. Again, in the electrical process there is no loss, no escaping of valuable elements in the form of gases. Prepared neat is an almost smokeless fuel. It burns to the last vestige, leaves a clean, white ash and no clinker. '