 Chapter 52 of Science and Short Chapters. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Chad Jackson. Science and Short Chapters by W. Matthew Williams. Merchison and Babbage. The curious contrast of character presented by these two eminent men and the very different course of their lives conveys a striking lesson to all those superficial thinkers and unthinking talkers who make sweeping generalizations concerning human character, who assume, as a matter of course, that any man who writes poetry must be merely a dreamer of daydreams incapable of transacting any practical daily business, and not at all reliable in money matters, whose eyes are always in a fine frenzy rolling, that he is, in short, a sort of amiable, harmless lunatic. All actors, according to such people, are dissipated spin-thriffs, and if Sim's Reeves or any other public performer is prevented by delicate larynx or other in disposition from appearing, they look knowing, shrug their shoulders, wink wisely, and assume without the faintest shadow of evidence that he is drunk. In like manner they set up a typical philosopher of their own manufacture and attribute his imaginary character to all who devote themselves to science. Their philosopher is a musty, dried-up, absent-minded pedant, whose ordinary conversation is conducted in words of seven syllables, who is always lost in profound abstractions, takes no interest in common things, regards music, dancing, play-acting, poetry, and every cheerful pursuit as frivolous and contemptible, a creature who never makes a joke, seldom laughs, and who, in matters of business, is even more incapable than the poet. The singular contrast of character presented by Babbage and Murchison affords at once a most complete refutation of such generalizations. Here were two men, both philosophers, one the very type of amiability, suavity, and all conceivable polish, the very perfection of a courtier, but differing from the vulgar courtier of the court in this respect, that his high-toned courtesy was not bestowed upon kings only, but also upon all his human brethren, and with a special gracefulness upon those who ranked was below his own. I doubt whether there is any man now living, who has lived during this generation, that could equal Sir Roderick Murchison in the art of distributing showers of compliments upon a large number of different people in succession, and making each recipient delightfully satisfied with himself. In his position as chairman to the geological section of the British Association, he did this with marvelous tact, without the least fulsomeness or repetition, or any display of patronizing. Every man who read a paper before that section was better than ever satisfied with the great merits and vast importance of his communication, after hearing the chairman's comments upon it. None but a most detestably strong-minded and logical brute could resist the insinuating flattery of Sir Roderick. How different was poor Babbage? Who that attends any sort of scientific gatherings has not seen Sir Roderick? But who in the world, accepting the organ grinders and the police magistrate has ever seen Babbage or even his portrait? What a contrast between the seclusion and the public existence, between the hedgehog bristles and the velvet softness of the one and the other. Those who are on intimate terms with Babbage, I have never met or heard of such a person, could probably tell us that all his irritability and roughness were outside, and that, in the absence of organ grinders, he was a kind and amiable gentleman. But, even at meaning this, the contrast between the two philosophers is as great as could well be found between any two men following the most widely divergent studies or professions. Those who would reply that mathematics and geology are such different studies have only to go a little further back on the death roll, and they will find the name of De Morgan, a pure mathematician like Babbage. He was a man of exuberant fun and humor, and so far from hating music of either a humble or pretentious character, was a highly accomplished musician, both theoretical and practical, and if we are to believe confidential communications, one of his favorite instruments was the penny whistle, on which he was a most original and peculiar performer. He had not intended to reprint the above, which was written just after the death of Merchison and Babbage, but the comments that have recently followed the death of Darwin induced me to do so. Many have expressed their surprise at the unanimous expression of Darwin's friends concerning the geniality of his disposition, his gentleness, cheerfulness, his genuine humility, and simplicity of character. A third type of character is here presented, and that which corresponds most correctly with the true ideal of a modern philosopher, also represented by that great master of experimental science, Faraday. In both of these, there was the full measure of Merchison's amiability, but without the courtly polish of the ex-soldier. Philosophic meditation and close application to original research may, and often does, induce a certain degree of shyness due to a consciousness of the social disqualification which arises from that inability to fulfill all the demands for the small attentions which constitute conventional politeness, a disability due to the habits of consecutive thought and mental abstraction. A sensitive and amiable man would suffer much pain on finding that he had neglected to supply the small wants of the lady sitting next to him at a dinner party and would withdraw himself from the risk of repeating such unwitting rudeness. This holding back from ordinary society, though really due to a conscientious sense of social duty and tend to regard for the feelings of others, is too often referred to as a churlish, unsociality or arrogant assumption of superiority. If Newton really did mistake the lady's finger for a tobacco stopper, depend upon it the pain he suffered was far more acute than which he inflicted, and was suffered over and over again whenever the incident was recollected. End of chapter 52, Merchison and Babbage Chapter 53 of Science and Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, situated in the northeast of the island of Ireland. Science and Short Chapters by W. Mateu Williams Chapter 53, Atmosphere vs. Ether One of the most remarkable meteors of which we have a reliable record appeared on February 6th, 1818. Several accounts of it were published, the fullest being that in the Gentleman's Magazine of the Time. I may here add, parenthetically, that one reason why I have the special pleasure in writing these notes is that they contribute something towards the restoration of the ancient status of this magazine, which was at one time the only English serial that ventured upon any notable degree of exposition of popular science. Upon the data supplied by this account, Mr Jewel has calculated the height of the meteor and to have been 61 miles above the surface of the earth, and he states that this meteor is one of the few that have been seen in the daytime and is also interesting as having been one of the first whose observation afforded materials for the estimation of its altitude. It was seen in the neighbourhood of Cambridge at 2pm, also at Swaffham in Norfolk, and at Middleton, Chenney near Banbury. The distance between this and Cambridge is sufficient to afford a measurement of its height, provided its position above the horizon at both places was determined by tolerable accuracy. According to the Orthodox textbooks, the atmosphere of this earth terminates at a height of about 45 or 50 miles, or if not absolutely ended there, it ceases to be of appreciable density anywhere above this elevation. But here we have a fact which flatly contradicts the calculation. At 61 miles above the earth's surface, there must be atmospheric matter of sufficient density to offer to the passage of this meteor, through it an amount of resistance which produced an intense white heat visible by its luminosity in broad daylight. In the above quote paper read by Mr Jewel for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on December 1st, 1863, he refers to subsequent observations and estimates 116 miles as the elevation at which meteors in general are first observed. That is where our atmosphere is sufficiently dense to generate a white heat by the resistance it offers to the rapidly flying meteor. It is curious to observe how in dealing with actual physical facts a mathematician of the solid particle character of Jewel becomes compelled to particularly through overboard the orthodox theory of limited atmospheric extension. Here in making his calculations of the resistance of atmospheric matter at this elevation, he bases them on the assumption of a decrease of density at the rate of one quarter for every seven miles and indicates no limit at which this rate shall vary. Very simple arithmetic is sufficient to show that this leads us to the unlimited atmospheric extension for which I have contended we may go on forever taking off a quarter at every seven miles and there will still remain the three quarters of the quantity upon which we stand operated or more practically stated we shall thus go on seven after seven until we reach the boundaries of the atmospheric grasp of the gravitation of some other sphere. Surely the time has arrived for the full reconsideration of this fundamental question of whether the universe is filled with atmospheric matter or is the vacuum of the molecular mathematicians plus the imaginary ether which has been invented by its mathematical creators only to extricate them from the absurd dilemma into which they are plunged when they attempt to explain the transmission of light and heat by undulations travelling through space containing nothing to undulate. They have filled it with immaterial matter evolved entirely from their own consciousness which they have gratuitously endowed with whatever properties are required for the fitting of their theories properties that are self-contradictory and without any counterpart in anything senior or known outside of the fertile imagination of these regular starists. We know of nothing that can penetrate every form of matter without adding either to its weight or its bulk we know of nothing that can communicate motion to ponderable matter without itself being ponderable that is having the primary property of matter vis mass or weight and subsequent vis-viva when moving. We know of nothing that can set bodies in motion without proportionally resisting the motion of bodies through it and if the waving of the ether as Tindall describes it as real and as truly mechanical as the breaking of sea waves upon the shore the material of the breakers must be like the jelly to which he compares it and have some viscosity or resistance to penetrate or pushing aside. We have not a shadow of direct evidence of the existence of the inter-atomic spaces occupied by the other and in the midst of which the atoms are made to theoretically swing not even of the existence of the atoms themselves the ether of today with its imaginary penetration and its material action without material properties has merely taken the place of the equally imaginary flog-a-stone caloric electric and magnetic fluids the imponderables the past. I have little doubt that our long the modern modification of these physical superstitions will share their fate and we shall all adopt the simple concept that heat, light and electricity are like sound merely transmissible states or reflections of matter itself regard it bodily as it is seen and felt to exist. This may possibly throw a good many mathematicians out of work or into more useful work but however that may be it will certainly aid the general diffusion of science as the intellectual inheritance of every human being. At present the explanations of the simple phenomena of light and heat are incomparably more difficult to understand and to account for than the facts which they attempt to elicit and of chapter 53 recording by Chad Horner for Bolly Clare in Countyampton, Rowland, Ireland, situated in the north east of the island of Ireland Chapter 54 of Science in Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by phone short chapters by W. Machu Williams A Neglected Disinfectant When the household of our grandmothers was threatened with infection the common practice was to sprinkle brimstone on hot shovel or on hot coals on a shovel and carry the burning result through the house but now this simple method of disinfecting has gone out of fashion without any good and sufficient reason. The principle reason is neither good nor sufficient that is that nobody can patent it and sell it in chilling and half-crowned bottles. On September 18th last Michel Dabadi read a paper at the Academy of Sciences on marsh fevers and stated that in the dangerous regions of African river mouths immunity from such fevers is feared by sulfur fumigations on the naked body also that the Sicilian workers in low ground sulfur mines suffer much less than the rest of the surrounding population from intermittent fevers. Michel Fouquet has shown that Zaviria on the volcanic island of Milo or Milos the most westerly of the cyclades which had a population of 40,000 when it was the centre of operations became nearly depopulated by marsh fever when the sulfur mining was moved farther east and the emanations prevented by a mountain from reaching the town. Other similar cases were stated. It is well understood by chemists that bleaching agents are usually good disinfectants that which can so disturb an organic compound as to destroy its colour is capable of either arresting or completing the decompositions that produce vile odours and nourish the organic germs or ferments which usual accompany or as some affirm cause them. Sulfurous acid is next to hypochlorous acid one of the most effective bleaching agents within easy reach. I should add that sulfurous acid is the gas that is directly formed by burning sulfur. By taking up another dose of oxygen it becomes sulfuric acid which combined with water is oil of vitriol. The bleaching and disinfecting action of the sulfurous acid is connected with its activity in appropriating the oxygen which is loosely held or being given off by organic matter. Chlorine and hypochlorous acid which is still more effective than chlorine itself act in the opposite way so do the permanganates such as condies fluid etc. They supply oxygen in the presence of water. It is curious that opposite actions should produce light results. A disquisition on this and its suggestions would carry me beyond the limits of a note. Chapter 54 Chapter 55 of Science in Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by phone. Science in Short Chapters by W. Matthew Williams. Another Disinfectant The above named disinfectants are objectionable on account of their own odours and their corrosive action. Both sulfurous acid and hypochlorous acid the active principle of the so-called chloride of lime have a disagreeable habit of rusting iron and suggesting antique green bronzes by their action on brass ornaments. Under serious conditions this should be endured but in many cases where the danger is not already developed the desired end may be attained without these annoyances. Sulfate of copper which is not patented or brought out by a limited company may be bought at its fair retail value of 6 pounds or less per pound the oil shop named for its blue vitriol and crystals readily soluble in water. I have lately used it in the case of a trouble to which English households are too commonly liable and one that has in many cases done serious mischief. The stoppage of a soil pipe caused the overflow of a closet and a consequent saturation of floorboards that in time would probably have developed danger by nourishing and developing those germs of bacteria, bacilli etc. which abound in the air and are ready to increase and multiply wherever their unsavory food abounds. By simply mopping the floor with the solution of these green crystals and allowing it to soak well into the pores of the wound they cease to become a habitat for such microscopic abominations. The copper salt poisons the poisoners. Dr Berg goes so far as to recommend that building materials, articles of furniture and clothing etc should be injected with sulfate of copper in order to avert infection and in support of this refers to the immunity of workers in copper from cholera, typhoid fever and infectious diseases generally. I agree with him to the extent of suggesting the desirability of occasionally mopping house floors with this solution Its visible effects on the wood are first to stain it with a faint green tinge which gradually tones down to a brown stain giving to the oldie appearance of oak a change which has no disadvantage from an artistic point of view. If the wood is already tainted with organic matter capable of giving off sulfurated hydrogen the darkening change is more rapid and decided owing to the formation of sulfide of copper. The solution of sulfate should not be put into iron or zinc vessels as it rapidly corrode them and deposits a non-adherent film of copper. It will even disintegrate common earthenware by penetrating the glaze and crystallizing within the pores of the wear but this is a work of time weeks or months. Stoneware resist this and wooden buckets may be used safely. It is better to keep the crystals and dissolve when required. Ordinary earthenware may be used with impunity if washed immediately afterwards. Chapter 56 of Science in Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by phone. Science in Short Chapters by W. Matthew Williams. This subject has been largely expanded and discussed lately in the Times and other newspapers. As most of my readers are doubtless aware it is simply a substitute for hay making bits, paving and building them round with stone or concrete then placing the green folder therein and covering it over with sufficient earth to exclude the air. We are told that very inferior material such as coarse maize grass mixed with chaff when thus preserved gives better feeding and milking results than good English hay. I may mention the experience of my own that bears upon this. When a boy I was devoted to silkworms and my very small supply of pocket money was overtaxed in the purchase of exorbitantly small penny-words of mulberry leaves at Covent Garden. But a friend in the country had a mulberry tree and that rather long intervals I obtained large supplies which in spite of all my careful wrapping in damp cloths became rotted in about ten days. I finally tried digging a hole and burying them. They remained fresh and green until all my silkworms commenced working and fasting stage of their existence. This was encelage on a small scale. The correspondence in the newspapers has suggested a number of reasons why English farmers do not follow the example of their continental neighbors in this respect. Climate, difference of grasses etc etc are named but a real reason why this is commercially impossible and farming properly so cold is becoming a lost art in England mere meadow or prairie grazing gradually superseding it is not named in any part of the discussion that I have read. I refer to the cause which is abolishing the English prairie which drives us to the commercial absurdity of importing fragile eggs from France, Italy, Spain etc apples from the other side of the Atlantic tame house-fed rabbits from Belgium and so on with all other agricultural products which are precisely those we are naturally best able to produce at home. I mean those demanding a small area of land and a proportionately large amount of capital and labour. A poultry or rabbit farm, acre for acre, demands fully ten times the capital, ten times the labour, and yields ten times the produce obtained by our big field beef and mutton grazers. The scientific and economic merits of encelage are probably all that is claimed for it and it is especially adept for uncertain hay-making climate but what farmer who is merely a lodger on the land holding it as an annual tenant at will or under a stinted beggarly lease of 21 years would expend his capital in building a costly silo which becomes by our feudal laws and usages the absolute property of the landlord. Our tenant farmers employ the latest and best achievements of engineering science in the form of implements but take care that they shall be upon wheels or otherwise non fixtures and use rich chemically prepared manures provided they are not permanent while they abstain from improvement which involve any serious outlay in the form of fixtures on the land. Those who lecture them about their want of enterprise should always remember that their condition is merely a form of feudal serfdom tempered by the possession of capital and that older agricultural operations are influenced by a continual struggle to prevent their capital from falling into the hands of the feudal lord. Anybody who has ever read an ordinary form of English farm lease with its prohibitions concerning the sale of hay and straw and restrictions to forecours or other mode of cultivation must see the hopelessness of any development of British agriculture comparable to that of British commerce and manufacturer. Imagine the condition of a London shopkeeper or midland manufacturer holding his business premises as a yearly tenant liable at six months notice to quit with confiscation of all his business fixtures. End of chapter 56 recording by phone Chapter 57 of Science in Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information auto volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Avae in August 2019 Science in Short Chapters by W. Matthew Williams Chapter 57 The Fracture of Comets The view of the Constitution of Comets expounded in one of my notes of April last, that is that they are meteoric systems consisting of a central mass or masses around which a multitude of minor bodies are revolving like satellites around their primary is strongly confirmed by the curious proceedings of the present Comet which proceedings also justify my last note of last month pointing out the omission of our astronomers who have neglected the positive and irregular repulsive action of the Sun upon Comets, that like the great Comets of 1843, 1880 and 1882 come within a few hundred thousand miles of the visible solar surface. The solar prominences are stupendous eruptions from the Sun, consisting as the spectroscope demonstrates of hydrogen flames and incandescent metallic vapours ejected with furious violence to visible distances ranging from 10 or 20 to above 300,000 miles. But this flame shown by the spectroscope is but the flash of a gun, the actual ejection proceeding vastly farther, far beyond the limits of the corona as described in last month's notes. These eruptions are so abundant that Setge alone observed and recorded 2767 in one year, 1871. Speaking generally, the Sun is never free from them and they proceed from all parts of the Sun, but most abundantly from the Sun spot zones. A system of meteoric bodies such as opposed to form a Comet, I mean the Comet as it exists in space before the generation of its tail, which is only formed as it approaches the Sun, could not approach so near to the Sun as did the present Comet at Perihelion without encountering more or less of these furious blasts. The flash of some of which have been seen to move with a measurable mean velocity of above 300 miles per second and a probable maximum velocity sufficient to eject solid matter beyond the reclaiming grasp of solar gravitation. It is evident that such a meteoric system as I suppose to constitute a Comet would, in the course of a rapid Perihelion flight crossing these out blasts be liable to various degrees of ejection in different parts that would disturb its original structure by blowing some of its constituents out of their orbits, or even quite away from the control of the feeble gravitation of the general meteoric mass, and thus affecting a rupture of the Comet. Now such a disintegration or dispersion of the present Comet has been actually observed. Several Able observers have described a breaking of the head of this Comet shortly after its Perihelion passage. Commander Samson Observations was the great 26 inch equatorial telescope of the Washington Naval Observatory are very explicit. On October 25 he saw the nucleus as a single well-defined globular body. On November 3 with the same telescope he saw a triple nucleus due to the formation of two additional minor bodies. These were more distinctly seen on November 6. Mr. W. R. Brooks of New York saw a detached fragment of the Comet which afterwards faded out of view. Professor Schmidt observed another and similar fragment which has likewise disappeared. All these observations indicate disruption due to some disturbing force, acting with different degrees of violence upon different portions of the Comet. Minor disturbances of this kind will, I think, account for the trail of metallic bodies which Scaparelli has shown to follow the paths of other Comets. A great disturbance might give quite a new orbit to the meteoric fragments. These considerations suggest another and a curious view of the question of possible cometary collision with the Sun. That is that a Comet might be travelling in such an orbit as to make it mathematically due to plunge obliquely beneath the solar surface at its next perihelion, but on its approach to the surface of the Sun it might encounter so violent an outrush of solar prominence matter as to drive it bodily out of its course and avert the threatened peril to its existence. End of Chapter 57 Chapter 58 of Science in Short Chapters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Abai in August 2019 Science in Short Chapters by W. Mathieu Williams Chapter 58 The Origin of Comets We read in storybooks of uncomfortable people who have cherished a guilty secret in their bosoms, that it has nought their vitals until at last they have carried it to the grave. I have such a secret that does the knowing business whenever I write or speak of comets concerning the origin of which I am guilty of a hypothesis that has hitherto been cherished as a foreset from the very shame of adding another to an already exaggerated heap of speculations on celestial physics. It assumes in the first place that all the other suns which we see are stars and constituted like our own sun, that they eject great eruptions similar to the prominences above described and even of vastly greater magnitude, as in the case of the flashing stars that have excited so much wonderment among astronomers, but which I regard simply as suns like ours, subject like ours to periodic maximum and minimum activities, but of greater magnitude. If such is the case, some of the prominent matter or vaporous constituents of these suns must be ejected with much greater proportional violence than are those from our sun, but those from our sun have been proved to rush out on some occasions with a velocity so great that the solar gravitation cannot bring them back. If such is ever the case with the explosions of our sun, it must be a frequent occurrence with the greater explosions of certain stars, and therefore vast quantities of meteoric matter are continually ejected into space and travelling there until they come within the gravitation domain of some other sun, like ours, when they will necessarily be bent into such orbits as those of comets. But what will be the nature of these meteoric matter? If from our sun it would be a multitude of metallic hailstones, due to the condensation of the metallic vapor by cooling as it leaves the sun, and such meteoric hail would correspond to the meteoric stones that fall upon our Earth, and which, for reasons stated in the fuel of the sun, I believe to be of solar origin. Besides these, there would be ice hail, such as Chevedorf claims to be meteoric. A star mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon or densely enveloped in these gases, as the spectroscope indicates to be the case in some of these flashing stars, would eject hydrocarbon vapors, condensable by cooling into solids similar to those we obtain by the condensation of terrestrial hydrocarbon vapors, paraffin, camphor, terpentine, and all the essential oils, for example. And thus we should have the meteoric systems composed of these particles circulating about their own common center of mass, as above stated, and displaying the spectrum which Dr. Huggins has found common to comets. If this is correct, the present comet comes from a sun that contains metallic sodium in addition to the hydrocarbons, as the spectrum of this metal was seen when this comet was near enough to the sun to render its vapor incandescent. End of chapter 58 End of Science in Short Chapters by W. Mathieu Williams