Science Sittings

New Zealand Tablet, 25 January 1912, Page 51

Science Sittings

By ‘ Volt.’

, :An Enormous Tree. ' A wonderfully straight giant Douglas fir, growing in the great fir timber belt in ' Washington, measured seven feet nine inches at the base, and reached a height of.-300 feet. From it 40,000 feet of serviceable lumber was obtained, and from the material alone a two-story house containing, fourteen rooms was built. ■ * Gigantic ’ Indeed. The White . Star, liner Gigantic, which is to be built by Messrs. Harland and Wolff, Belfast, will be 1000 feet in length/: 112 feet beam, and will have a displacement of -70,000 tons, There will be accommodation for over 4000 passengers, and the vessel will cost nearly „ £2,000,000. Her appointments will include golf links, cricket field, and tennis court. ■ Unique Newspaper. , x ( . v> In; British Columbia there is a little newspaper, the Kamloops Wawa, circulated among several tribes of North American Indians. The unique feature of this journal is that it is„ printed in shorthand. Some years ago the Rev. J. M. Le June, a Breton missionary, arrived in British Columbia to take charge of a territory some fifty miles square. According to the Strand , he found the great obstacle to his work to be the absence of any means of written communication, as the natives had no written language of their own. His repeated efforts, to teach them to read and write by ordinary methods failed entirely. This missionary was acquainted with the simple French Duployan short- " hand, and then conceived the novel idea of teaching the Indians to write their own language phonetically by means of the shorthand characters. He adapted the stenographic signs to the Chinook language, and . the experiments proved a complete success. There are to-day three thousand Indians able to read,and write their own language by no other means than shorthand. Wawa ’ means ‘talk’ in the Chinook, hence the title of the little newspaper, which has been the natural outcome of the missionary’s undertaking. Threshing Machines. The flail is the most ancient instrument for threshing grain, although it is possible that the tramping of the straw under the feet of horses, oxen: and men is a close second. The Romans used a machine called the tribulum,’ a sledge loaded with stones or iron and drawn over the grain sheaves by horses or oxen. The first machine attempted in modern times for the work of threshing was invented by one Michael Mengies of Edinburgh, about 1732. Some thirty years later Andrew Meikle built a similar machine. It was not until the middle of the • nineteenth century, however, that the threshing machine reached anything like its present perfection* • V ■ Man Would Be a Wonder if Built on. Insect Scale. A beetle can draw 40 times its own weight. If a horse were proportionately as strong it could haul five tons. ' /r- " . If , a man could travel as fast in proportion as . locusts he could go around the world .in a day or so. > - A flea can jump 200 times its own length; for a . man that would be a leap of a quarter of a mile. : If a man could travel, as fast'proportionately as a : ■ fly he could cover six miles a minute. ■: ;• r / WT7 1 - If a man had a dragon appetite he would eat - a whole roast chicken, vegetables and pie in five minutes and then eat another meal of the same amount, and . keep _ that up all the afternoon. . •' If the average baby ate as much as : the silkworm ' baby does it would, when a month old, be bigger than j /the giants you read about .in the fairy stories. | ; It is only because these insects are so very small k that there is enough food to go around. If there were , x one species of insects as large as human beings they T would . eat: everything up.