Science Sittings

New Zealand Tablet, 19 October 1911, Page 2107

Science Sittings

Yellow Snow. Yellow snow has fallen in the Engadine. Yellow snowfalls have occurred in the Alps in 1850 and 1867, on both occasions in the month of February, being caused by a combination of winds in which the African sirocco plays an important part, blowing the minute sands of the Sahara across the Mediterranean and Italy and over the frontier Alps into Switzerland. A Rare Spectacle. Strangers were afforded recently a rare spectacle at Lucerne. The deep red color which has given a small lake near Lucerne the name of the Lake of Blood has appeared after an interval of many years. The phenomenon is said to be due to a red Alpine plant with which the bed of the lake is overgrown. The peasantry say it forebodes a great war. The last time the phenomenon occurred was shortly before the war in 1870-71. A Modern Sky-scraper. The largest building enterprise in the world (says the New York Herald is that undertaken by the Woolworth Building Company in the construction of their sky-scraper in New York. This huge erection is situated in the best part of Broadway, between Barclay street and Park place, facing City Hall Park and in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. The building, which is in course of erection, was begun in 1910, and will be completed by the fall of 1912 that is to say, the entire construction will take from eighteen months to two years. The work is being carried on night and day. The building will be 750 feet high, and will comprise fifty-five storeys. The plot of land on which it is constructed is 152 feet by 197 feet, and has cost 4,500,000 dollars. The foundations were made with caissons of 19 feet in diameter sunk to the bedrock 110 feet to 130 feet below the sidewalk. The earth was taken out of the caissons, and they were filled with concrete, which gives all guarantees for solidity. This work alone has cost 1,000,000 dollars. The construction, which will be entirely fireproof, as it is to be made of steel and terra-cotta, will cost from 7,000,000 to 8,000,000 dollars. Some Methods of Catching Fish. Extraordinary methods of fishing are practised by people of different countries, which are not the result of ignorance but of that ingenuity which dire necessity and the instincts of self-support exert in original methods. Those of the Chinese are especially quaint and curious away inland, where they have not yet adopted the generally accepted system of working nets. , A very popular method far up the Ning-Po river is generally practised at night, and depends on the attraction which a white screen stretched under the water appears to possess for the fishes, decoying them to it and making them leap. Some tribes of South American Indians catch fish by drugging them. They make the soft branches and leaves of the Indian milk-bush into pulp, which they strew in the water. When the fish taste it they lose the power of swimming, and are easily caught, floating helplessly on the surface. Other aborigines mix with dough a powder made from a shrub, the ‘ cocculus Indians,’ the effect of which, when thrown into the water, is to stupify the fish, and they swim in circles on the surface, where they are caught by the hand or nets. The Fuegians have a wonderful contrivance for killing the sharks which abound off their coasts. A log of wood shaped like a canoe is set afloat, with a rope and large noose hanging from one end. Before long a shark attacks the supposed canoe, swimming after it, and is caught in the noose hanging from the stern. It tightens so that he cannot extricate himself, and the weight of the log keeps him swimming slowly without being able to sink. The natives in their canoes then approach at their leisure, and kill the huge fish with their spears.