Our Plant Immigrants 



20 1 



pistache orchards, the pioneers of the • 

 new pistache industry, that will some 

 day make this delicious nut as common 

 as the almond is, not as a coloring and 

 flavoring material for ice creams, but 

 as a nut for the table, to serve as salted 

 almonds are now. Mr Swingle, the en- 

 thusiastic introducer of this nut, has 

 searched throughout the world for all 

 the pistache species that can be found, 

 some to use as stocks and others to 

 breed from, and there is every prospect 

 that he will succeed in introducing into 

 the arid regions of the Southwest an 

 entirely new nut industry. 



These are some of the many prob- 

 lems that the government enterprise of 



Plant Introduction is engaged in solv- 

 ing. 



They are problems that private enter- 

 prise will not naturally undertake ; 

 they are problems that concern the 

 wealth-producing power of American 

 soil ; they are problems that the govern- 

 ment has shown its ability to solve in a 

 manner involving an insignificant out- 

 lay of the public funds. They encour- 

 age the production of food and other 

 products that we now import from 

 other lands, and they concern the estab- 

 lishment of farm industries which, for 

 generations to come, will support hun- 

 dreds of thousands, perhaps millions, 

 of American citizens. 



MODERN TRANSMUTATION OF THE 

 ELEMENTS* 



By Sir William Ramsay 



THE story of helium is perhaps 

 one of the most romantic in the 

 history of science; and it is a 

 story of which the last chapters are still 

 unwritten. Originally seen as a spectrum 

 line .in the chromosphere of the sun, it 

 was discovered on the earth twenty-eight 

 years later ; and it has provided the first 

 authentic case of transmutation — a prob- 

 lem which occupied the alchemists from 

 the sixth century. 



On August 18, 1868, an eclipse of the 

 sun was visible in India. Among those 

 who observed it was the celebrated 

 French astronomer Janssen, and for the 

 first time a spectroscope was employed to 

 analyze and trace to its sources the light 

 evolved by the edge or "limb" of the sun. 

 It appeared that enormous prominences, 

 moving at an almost incredible rate, were 

 due to hurricanes of hydrogen. That the 

 gas blown out beyond the shadow of the 

 moon was really hydrogen was revealed 



by the red, blue-green, and violet lines 

 which characterize its spectrum. Among 

 these lines was one occupying nearly the 

 position of the two lines characteristic of 

 the spectrum of glowing sodium, named 

 D 1 and D 2 by Fraunhofer ; and this third 

 line was characterized as D^ by Janssen. 

 On October 20, 1868, Sir Norman Lock- 

 yer, in a note presented to the Royal So- 

 ciety by Dr Sharpey, mentioned that he 

 had "established the existence of three 

 bright lines" in the "chromosphere," a 

 word suggested by Sharpey to denote the 

 colored atmosphere surrounding the sun ; 

 one of these was "near D." It was known 

 that an increase of pressure had the effect 

 of broadening spectrum lines ; and Frank- 

 land and Sir Norman Lockyer were at 

 first inclined to attribute this new line to 

 a broadening of the sodium lines, owing 

 to the pressure of the uprush of gas, 

 causing the hurricane. However, neither 

 this hypothesis nor a subsequent one, that 



* From the Athenaeum. 



