43 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



obtain a specimen except through some 

 fraud; and persons detected in defrauding 

 the government of its cinnamon usually have 

 to atone for the offense with their lives. 



A Himalayan Landscape. Mr. W. M. 



Gonway, the Himalayan explorer, describes 

 the view as an astonishing one which sur- 

 rounds the traveler from Srinagar to Gil- 

 git when he has emerged from the defiles 

 which sunder the valley of Hunza Nagyr 

 from Gilgit, and has climbed the vast ancient 

 moraines near Tashot that form the final 

 rampart of the fertile basin. "The bottom 

 of the valley is, as usual, deeply furrowed by 

 debris, the surface of which is covered by 

 terraced fields, faced with Cyclopean mason- 

 ry, and rich with growing crops and count- 

 less fruit trees. The mountains fling them- 

 selves aloft on either hand with astounding 

 precipitousness, as it were, into the upper- 

 most heights of heaven so steeply, in fact, 

 that a spring avalanche falling from the sum- 

 mit of Rakipershi on the south must almost 

 reach the bottom of the valley. Rakipershi 

 is 25,500 feet high ; the Hunza peak is about 

 24,000 feet high. Their summits are sepa- 

 rated by a distance of nineteen miles. Both 

 mountains are visible from base to summit 

 at one and the same time from the level floor 

 of the valley between them, which is not 

 more than 7,000 feet above the sea. No 

 mountain view I saw in the Karakorums 

 surpasses this for grim wonder of colossal 

 scale, combined with savage grandeur of 

 form and contrast of smiling foreground." 



Composition of Clays. The word clay, 

 says Mr. Robert T. Hill, in his paper (United 

 States Geological Survey) on the Clay Mate- 

 rials of the United States, has a diverse and 

 elastic meaning. To the popular mind it is 

 the familiar, gritless, plastic earth which is 

 readily molded when wet. To the manufac- 

 turer it is the material he molds and bakes, 

 which may be the natural plastic material of 

 the popular mind, or a mixture of many in- 

 gredients either natural or artificial, accord- 

 ing to the refinement of the ultimate prod- 

 uct ; this product varies as to simplicity of 

 processes from the ordinary brick clays, 

 which are natural mixtures of the essential 

 sand and clay with iron and other accesso- 

 ries, to the washed, ground, screened, and 



compressed mixture of kaolin, feldspar, flint, 

 and plastic clay from which the potter shapes 

 china and porcelain into works of art. Clay 

 material in nature is not always plastic, and 

 many of the most valuable products are made 

 from consolidated rock, as the Cornwall stone 

 or rock kaolin, which is a crumbling granite. 

 Many common brick clays are more like im- 

 pure sand than clay, and some of these, from 

 the earliest times, have been molded with 

 straw to give them sufficient tenacity for the 

 handling necessary before burning. Much 

 of the aboriginal pottery of America is com- 

 posed of various earths, with just enough 

 clay to hold the particles together. The 

 chief function of clay in the fictile arts is 

 its partial fusion upon firing, and upon this 

 and the skill of the artisan who fires the kiln 

 depends the product, which is wonderfully 

 varied by the mixtures of fluxes and temper- 

 ing material. Plasticity is desirable for the 

 handling of the unfired material. Nearly all 

 unconsolidated or powdered material may be 

 made to adhere by water and other ingre- 

 dients than clay, so that it can be shaped 

 for burning, but plastic clay is the cheapest 

 natural material used for this purpose in all 

 clay burning. The material for the coarse 

 products occurs naturally, and is mixed with 

 the non-plastic kaolins by the porcelain-mak- 

 er to give the " clay " the necessary tenacity 

 for handling and shaping. 



NOTES. 



AN Experimental Study, by William 0. 

 Krohn, of simultaneous stimulations of the 

 sense of touch, made upon ten different per- 

 sons, among its interesting results showed 

 that skin over the joints is much more sensi- 

 tive than at other places ; that touches on 

 the back of the body are more distinctly 

 felt, more clearly remembered, and therefore 

 better localized than on the front part of the 

 body ; that the localizations are better for 

 points not on the median line than for those 

 on it ; that they are not so correctly made 

 on the left as on the right side of the body ; 

 that they are better on hairy portions than 

 on those not covered with hairs ; and that a 

 difference in the power of correct localization 

 exists between usually clothed and usually 

 unclothed parts ; the parts not covered, ex- 

 cept in case of the joints, giving the more 

 correct localizations. 



BY exposing hen's eggs to the vapors of 

 alcohol for periods ranging from twenty-six 

 to forty- eight hours, M. Ch. Fe>6 has ascer- 



