420 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



iron preparations. Iron exists in our food, in our body, and most largely in the 

 red coloring substance of the blood. Now this coloring matter or hemaglobine 

 and iron, diminish when the number of globules grow less, or even where their 

 state has become altered, though plentiful in point of numbers. This is the case 

 in chlorosis, where the iron in the blood is reduced by one-half. Preparations of 

 iron are naturally administered for this disease, but the efficacy of the medica- 

 ment does not lie in exciting the functions of nutrition. The iron has an action 

 special in the formation of the red globules, and that action must be sustained 

 by curing the stomach and stimulating nutrition by baths. The globules are not 

 solely composed of iron, but of nitrogenous and fatty substances also, hence 

 why a meat diet, tempered with fatty matters, such as cod-liver oil, favor the 

 regeneration of red globules. 



The French Association for the Advancement of Science, has held its meet- 

 ing this year at Rochelle. The inaugural address was delivered by M. Janssen, 

 director of the Observatory at Meudon. Among other interesting points he stat- 

 ed that it was not Galileo who discovered the first spots on the Sun, but one 

 Fabricius, in 1610. He showed the spots were upon the Sun itself, and not as 

 was then believed, due to the interposition of small planets. Spectral analysis 

 reveals that not only the suns and stars visible to us, but those so distant that 

 the most powerful telescopes are incapable to assign them a sensible diameter ; nay 

 more, those nebulae which appear to the best instruments as .only faint rays of 

 light, have been seized by chemistry, by spectral analysis, and shown to be com- 

 posed of the same matter as our own planets, of the same as we ourselves are 

 formed. Also, that despite the fabulous distances of the nebulae, chemistry dem- 

 onstrates that they are subject to the laws of gravitation. When Newton decom- 

 posed a ray of white light and thus laid the basis of the theory of the spectre, he 

 little thought his law of gravitation would there find wings to carry it to regions 

 where all measurement ceases and all calculation is powerless. 



By spectral analysis and photography, the Sun's atmosphere has no longer 

 mysteries forus ; round the central kernel is aluminous envelope — photosphere, 

 formed of incandescent hydrogen, traversed by eruptions of metallic vapors, so- 

 dium, magnesium, calcium, etc. This photospere is itself surrounded by another 

 atmosphere, very profound and very rarified. Hurricanes of the most frightful 

 nature occur in the photosphere, which disturb the repose of matter, forming 

 globules of light. The substance of the Sun, as the blood of animals, owes its. 

 force then, to globules. 



