POPULAR SCTET^CE NEWS. 
[January, 1890. 
heather. Now we find petrified equisetaceae which 
are as thick as one's arm or leg, and Ijcopodiacese 
which have grown to large trees; but we find noth- 
ing in the petrified plants that can compare to our 
oaks, cedars, pines, and other giant trees, — there is 
no specimen on record of more than four feet in 
diameter. And if we are told of the enormous size 
of the ichthyosaurus, dinotherium, and others 
among the fossil animals, the mammoth, or elephas 
primogenius, was not materially larger than the 
present Asiatic elephant. We can show that our 
oceans and seas contain gigantic whales which 
exceed in size the largest types of fossil fauna. 
Much has been said about the mammoth in Bibli- 
cal and natural history. According to some, the 
name is corrupted from behemoth, or the Russian 
"mammont," and which did not exceed the largest 
elephant in size ; on the contrary, it had a smaller 
head, weaker chest bones, and shorter and thicker 
legs. We are told, too, that fossil tusks of twelve 
feet or more have been found. Granted ; but we 
must remember that the tusks of elephants grow on 
till the animal dies, no matter how great be its age ; 
and, as the mammoth was neither tamed nor 
hunted for the sake of ivory, it could grow on and 
reach the advanced age that was natural to it. 
We know that the body of the northern whale 
sometimes reaches to sixty-six feet long, and at the 
fins, forty feet in circumference. The body of the 
sperm whale is sometimes seventy feet long, by 
thirty-eight in circumference, and the fin-backed 
whale exceeds all other animals in length, and often 
attains to one hundred feet, by ten in circumference. 
Now we look in vain for such monsters in the 
earlier periods of creation. The largest crocodiles 
average from twenty to thirty feet long, but this is 
considered small in comparison to the fantastic 
leviathans of the sea and huge land animals of the 
primeval world. When the bones of the iguanodon 
were first found, its length was immediately reckoned 
to be one hundred and sixty feet; but Prof. R. 
Owen surprised these superficial reckoners by 
reducing it to twenty-eight feet, of which three were 
for the head, twelve for the body, and thirteen for 
the tail. The hylseosaurus and megalosaurus are 
often supposed to reach from sixty to eighty feet, 
the mistake in calculation being based on the first 
find, of the size and massive form of a single bone, 
which does not determine the whole size of the 
body. Prof Owen's trustworthy computation puts 
the length of the former at twenty-five feet at most, 
and the latter at thirty feet. These are the most 
colossal land saurians ; the longest ichthyosaurus 
did not attain to more than thirty feet, and the 
dinotherium did not exceed twenty feet in length. 
Generally speaking, although many huge forms 
of the primitive world do not exist in the present 
condition of things, yet their places are filled by 
other massive forms, so that the present state of 
nature is not so very much inferior, if it is at all, to 
the earlier state, in respect to the size of the organic 
forms. On the other hand, animals of middle size, 
small, and even of microscopic dimensions, are not 
wanting in the fossil fauna. Whole beds of rock, 
with an aggregate thickness of hundreds — yea, 
thousands — of feet, are made up of shells which 
witness their perfect preservation. The polishing 
stone from Bohemia, which we know as tripoli, is 
only an accumulation of the flinty coverings of 
organisms known as diatoms — so minute that no 
less than 41,000,000,000 of them go to make up a sin- 
gle cubic inch of stone. There are similar deposits 
30 feet thick, and of great extent, in Virginia, known 
as "infusorial earth." The "greensands" of the 
chalk and other periods, in the same way are found to 
consist mainly of the casts of minute shells, from 
which the lime has been dissolved, — a phenomenon 
which is being even repeated in various parts at 
the bottom of existing oceans, each grain being the 
cast of a single shell. 
The abundance of microscopic life in early periods 
is beyond calculation ; this, of itself, leads us to 
imagine millions of years intervening between the 
primitive and present fauna and flora. It seems 
very probable that some of the great clayey accum- 
ulations of past geological formations may be really 
the remains of minute shells. Many enormously 
thick beds of limestone, extending over vast regions, 
are also simply the wreck of countless millions of 
similar humble forms of life. • Our chalk is an 
example, and so is a similar deposit still being 
formed over large areas of the Atlantic and Pacific 
at great depths, almost wholly from the debris 
of minute shells. Whole limestone ranges in Rus- 
sia, America, and Britain owe their origin to a no 
more dignified source. They are built up of the 
shells of foraminifera. The petroleum so largely 
obtained in this country and Russia, may have an 
animal origin, as the "bituminous schists" of 
Caithness are impregnated with oily matter, appar- 
ently derived from the decomposition of masses of 
fish in them through long periods. The so-called 
nummulite limestone (from the Latin nummus — 
money) attains a thickness of many thousand feet, 
and extends from the Alps to the Carpathians, 
while it plays a great part in the formation of 
mountains and hills in Asia Minor, Persia, India, 
and Africa ; yet it is the creation of innumerable 
disk or money-like shells, though very small. 
In comparing the animals and plants of the 
earlier and later periods, we find that the earliest 
differ most and the later ones least from the present 
fauna and flora. It is certain, from the evidence of 
paleontological records, that a development of ani- 
mals and plants from a lower to a higher torm has 
taken place with each period or organic change. 
This, of course, can be explained. The earliest 
formations contained scarcely any but the remains 
of a low organization — fiowerless plants, corals, 
mollusks, articulata ; there are very few signs of 
fish and reptiles, and, so far as is known, no birds 
or mammals. In the succeeding strata, more highlv 
organized forms are found ; in the Carboniferous 
period there are some conifers, many fish, and a 
few reptiles ; in the Triassic period, higher reptiles 
are found quite prevalent, and a few mammals ; 
in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, a few dico- 
tyledonous plants and endogenous trees, with a great 
prevaU nee of higher reptiles, fishes, and birds; and 
in the Tertiary period, many dicotyledonous plants 
and mammals. In all cases, the lower organisms of 
the animal and vegetable world appear first, and 
the higher organisms later. Thus, of the radiata, 
the crinoidese appeared first; of the fish, the tailed 
ganoid and placoid ; of the reptiles, the saurians; 
of the birds, the marsh and tufted birds ; of the 
mammals, the oppossums and cetacea. The organic 
forms differ most from those now existing in the 
earliest strata, and the differences diminish steadily 
all through the more recent deposits. 
SCIENTIFIC BREVITIES. 
Improvement on the Phonograph. — In the 
present phonograph, a stylus for impressing the 
wax is attached to the center of the vibrating dia- 
phragm. The new improvement of G. Bettini is to 
extend little rods from the stylus to several parts of 
the diaphragm. In this way greater exactness of 
tone and speech is obtained, so the inventor claims, 
and much superior results. 
Inheritance of Accjuired Character.s. — With 
regard to the question of the inheritance of injuries, 
a correspondent of Nature writes about an Irish 
terrier bitch which had a litter by a mongrel terrier 
whose tail had been cut off with a hatchet. Of the 
litter, one puppy was without a tail. The Irish 
terrier belonged to the writer, and he says that she 
had had several litters before, none of which were 
irt any way deformed. 
An Industry in Artificial Sponges is in pro- 
cess of creation. M. Oscar Schmidt, professor at the 
University of Gratz, in Styria, has invented a 
method by which pieces of living sponge are broken 
off and planted in a favorable spot. From very 
small cuttings of this kind. Prof Schmidt has ob- 
tained large sponges in the course of three years, at 
a very small expense. One of his experiments gave 
the result that the cultivation of 4,000 sponges had 
not cost more than 225 francs, including the interest 
for three years on the capital expended. The 
Austro-IIungarian government has been so much 
struck with the importance of these experiments 
that it has officially authorized the protection of this 
new industry on the coast of Dalmatia. 
Invisible Ink.— M. E. Pecard has published an 
account of this chemical discovery. It is a mixed 
acid procured by a solution of molybdic acid in 
boiling oxalic acid. He calls it oxalomolybdic acid. 
The crystals of this acid are insoluble in strong 
nitric acid, but they dissolve in cold water. Paper 
written upon with the solution shows nothing in a 
weak light, but when brought into the sunshine the 
written characters suddenly appear in deep indigo 
blue. Paper saturated with the solution and dried 
in the dark becomes blue when exposed to the sun, 
and on this blue surface white characters may be 
written by dipping the pen in water. The color 
disappears in contact with water, and the blue 
writing becomes black when exposed to the heat of 
a fire. 
Artificial Musk. — A remarkable oily liquid, 
having a brown color, and smelling so like musk 
that, it is said, very few noses are able to detect the 
difference between the natural product and the arti- 
ficial body, is obtained by a new process. Two 
parts of isobutyl alcohol, three parts of meta-xylol, 
and nine parts of chlorate of zinc [Qy. chloride], are 
are heated together for eight or nine days at a temper- 
ature of about 440° or 450° F. in a strong vessel, the 
pressure inside of which speedily rises to nearly 
30 atmospheres, but gradually declines to about a 
quarter of that degree of tension when the whole is 
allowed to cool gradually. Th£ crude product so 
obtained is purified by distillation once or twice 
repeated, until an oily fluid is the result, which 
comes over between 220° and 260°; this, when ren- 
dered slightlj- alkaline, is the " musk" in question, 
and it may be diluted with alcohol, for the use of the 
perfumer, to any degree of odoriferous strength. 
Thermometer Scales.— Three scales have sur- 
vived. The Fahrenheit is the oldest, and dates 
from 1724. It is used popularly in Great Britain, 
the British colonies, and the United States. This 
scale was primarily divided into iSo°; zero was 
placed at temperate, a point corresponding with 
if C. ; the point to which the alcohol rose when 
placed under the arm of a healthy man was marked 
90°; and the temperature of a mixture of ice and 
salt, then believed to be the greatest possible cold, 
was marked — 90°. In 1714 Fahrenheit again altered 
his scale ; 0° was placed at the absolute zero, and 
the space between this point and that representing 
the warmth of the human body was divided into 
twenty-four degrees. The freezing point of water 
was now 8°. But these long degrees being incon- 
venient, each was divided into four, and thus in- 
stead of 8°, the freezing point of water became J2^' 
and the blood heat 96°. A mercurial thermometer 
thus graduated registered 212- as the boiling point 
of water. 
