July 



1888.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



207 



floor ; but had I been running unweighted the accident 

 ■would not have mattered in the least ; in a step or two I 

 should have recovered myself. Being loaded, however, and 

 with weights I did notcai-eto dropsuddenly, the case was dif- 

 ferent. The inertia I had to deal with was greater, by perhaps 

 150 pounds, than my own. Forgetting this, and holding on 

 to my baggage, I staggered along some twelve or fifteen 

 paces and should have come to the ground then, had I not 

 let my baggage go — somewhat to its detriment. It was a 

 striking lesson in the laws of inertia. 



A pretty illustration of inertia may be presented as fol- 

 lows : — Set up twenty di-aughtsmen, of the flat-faced sort, 

 into a vertical column. Now hold a long paper-knife with 

 one end of its horizontal face opposite the middle of one of 

 the lowest of these flat discs, the right hand exerting a 

 strong pressure such as would cause the knife to strike that 

 draughtsman did not the left hand resist the pressure. Sud- 

 denly release the paper-knife so that the action of the right 

 hand sends its end sharply against the draughtsman, 

 striking it horizontally out of the pile. It will fly cleanly 

 out, if the stroke is deftly delivered, and the rest of the 

 column will remain upright, lowered only by one draughts- 

 man's height. 



Drawing a strip of paper horizontally from under a heavy 

 coin standing on its edge, so shai-ply and neatly that the 

 coin is left standing, is another pretty illustration of inertia. 

 A crown will serve for this experiment, but the old two- 

 penny copper piece was better. 



I rather hesitate to mention that a table napkin spread on 

 a small table as a cloth for one man's dinner can be drawn 

 from under that dinner so deftly as to leave everything 

 standing. For this experiment requires skill, and skill 

 requires practice. Practising on portions of a dinner-service 

 is apt to be expensive. 



The way in which what seems a tremendous blow 

 with a hammer can be neutralised by what seems a crushing 

 weight is worth noticing. A man lies flat on his back and 

 a well-filled wooden trunk or some similar weight is placed 

 on what we conventionally agree to call his stomach. Now 

 let a confederate seize a mallet and strike a heavy blow on 

 the top of the trunk, a blow which delivered directly on the 

 stomach would be fatal. The blow does no harm whatever, 

 its force being taken up in giving a very slow and slight 

 downward motion to the hetivy weight. 



A needle can be driven through a sixpence or even a 

 shilling, if the coin is set upon a broad cork and the needle 

 is passed into a cork set on the coin. For the needle receives 

 the whole force of the blow along its length, and cannot 

 break because of the side pressures produced by the cork. 



A curious efiFect is produced if one breathes through a 

 cone-shaped blower at a small banner hanging in front of 



the open end. The banner waves toward the blower's 

 mouth, not from it. If the blower be reversed so that the 

 breath is blown in at the larger end (which, of course, must 

 not be too large) the usual effect of blowing will take place ; 

 but La the former experiment currents of air arise, which 



curling outward from the rim of the larger end of the 

 blower, cause a rarefaction of the air there, so that an in- 

 draught carrying the banner toward the blower is produced. 



In like manner may be explained the fact that blowing 

 upwards through a pipe as A B, figure 7, opening out on a 

 flat horizontal surface, as C D, a light piece of c;xrd situate 

 as pp (kept in any convenient way at a certain distance 

 from the orifice of the pipe) cannot be blown off, no matter 

 how strongly the blower may force his breath through the 

 pipe. The air blown in passes out in the direction shown 

 by the arrows (,' and D, and curving round above pp' 

 presses the card downwards as strongly as it is pressed 

 upwards by such portion of the Ijreath as reaches the under 

 side. 



The breath may be used to blow up a book — not after 

 the Saturday Iltvieirs fashion, but fairlj'. Place a heavy 

 book on a paper bag, like an ordinary flour bag, leaving the 

 mouth of the bag projecting from under the book. Then 

 blow steadily into the bag, the book will rise as the bag 

 swells. 



EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



By Ada 8. Ballin. 



xr. 

 1 1 E Chinese language bears traces of its great 

 antiquity in the strong evidences of phonetic 

 decay shown by the fact of the variety of 

 meanings rendered by one sound. There 

 ai'e over 40,000 distinct words, or more 

 properly speakinjr, characters, in Chinese, 

 though barely 10,000 are generally used in 

 the various branches of literature, and not 

 more than 3,000, perhaps, in ordinary conversation. But 

 to pi'onounce these iO,000 characters there are something 

 U7idey 500 sounds, putting the tones aside ; and while there 

 are a few sounds whose distribution, so to spe;\k, among the 

 characters is comparatively limited, there are others which 

 are so widely diffused as to fill us with astonishment. For 

 example, as Blr. Fred. H. Balfour writes to me, "• I once had 

 the curiosity to search through K'ang Hsi's Dictionary for 

 all the characters pronounced like the fifth letter of our 

 English alphabet. I counted considerably over seven hun- 

 dred, and my teacher, a Pekingese, informed me that by 

 going further afield, the list might be made up to a thou- 

 sand." I'seu has sixty ; le, eighty ; chui, a hundred ; ke, 

 one hundred and eighty ; and e no less than two hundred and 

 sixty-five different symbols attached to the one sound, and 

 there are not only hundreds of totally distinct characters with 

 only one monosyllabic sound among them, but one of those 

 characters often has a large variety of totally distinct mean- 

 ings. I subjoin a few examples, culled from Williams's 

 Syllabic Dictionary. 



^ Lwan. To bring into good order; a state of order; 

 to confuse, to throw into disorder; to mislay: discord, con- 

 fusion; insurrection, anarchy; out of place, disarranged; 

 tumultuous ; ravelled : to ferry over ; the end of a song. 



^ Foh. Plants extended ; trees appearing singly, no 

 brushwood ; gi'assy ; thin ; attenuated ; subtle ; a thin leaf 

 or plate; a pellicle; poor, unfortunate; economical; light, 

 few ; to diminish ; to slight, to treat coldly ; suspicious of ; 

 to approach; an initial particle, ah, so; to reach or extend 

 over ; careless, inattentive to, anyhow ; trifling ; a curtain 

 or screen. 



•^ Tzii. Anciently a child, but now confined to a son ; 

 a boy, a lad ; a person ; the people, in distinction from the 

 prince; a sage, a teacher, a venerable and worthy man, 



