234 Kansas Academy of Science. 



that consist wholly of the carcases of mammoths and other 

 giant vertebrates, piled upon one another from the sea bot- 

 tom to the surface, and so well preserved that their flesh is 

 eaten by Esquimaux and arctic carnivora. Really, our friends 

 Sternberg, Henry, Fairfield, Osburn, and other paleontologists 

 should be informed by wire of these inexhaustible deposits, 

 so they will not waste any more time on the barren deserts of 

 Africa and our own West. The change of climate in polar 

 regions, from tropic heat to arctic cold, was so sudden that 

 many of these huge beasts were "frozen while peacefully 

 grazing on the previously unfrosted vegetation." One is re- 

 minded of the naive remark of a four-year-old boy, after 

 gazing on some good specimens of taxidermal skill — "How did 

 they get them dead standing?" 



The laws of the conservation of matter and force are points 

 for attack upon prevailing theories. Inventions have been 

 multiplied to secure perpetual motion, or to do work without 

 the expenditure of an equivalent amount of energy. For 

 twenty odd years a man by the name of Keeley induced the 

 public, including many capitalists, to believe he had discov- 

 ered an occult force hitherto unknown, that was utilized in 

 his laboratories to run a machine, called after him the Keeley 

 motor. He was constantly on the point of perfecting it so 

 it could be put to practical use. For a quarter of a century 

 hard-headed business men of New York, after a look into his 

 laboratory at the motor buzzing away without any apparent 

 expenditure of energy, invested thousands of dollars to enable 

 him to complete his invention. After his death, an investiga- 

 tion of the laboratory revealed that the occult force was plain 

 compressed air contained in tubes concealed beneath the floor, 

 and Keeley slipped into his place among the fakirs. 



Last year the papers of the state contained descriptions of 

 an application of a windmill to secure locomotion. Its in- 

 ventor, a Kansan, gravely claimed his machine would run 

 faster against the wind than with it, because the windmill 

 would turn faster in such case. Mr. Chas. Trippler, of New 

 York, the first man to manufacture liquid air in large quan- 

 tities in this country, in an article in the McClure, several 

 years ago, claimed he could run his machine with liquid air 

 and at the same time produce more liquid' air than he used for 

 motive power. He has probably reread and meditated upon 

 the law of conservation since that date. 



