1873.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST, 
67 
BdDYs & mm ® 3 ©©wiim* 
Boys and Girls’ Brizes for 1873. 
Just now I am too busy to offer prizes for competition, 
but they will come later. In the moan while, to keep 
matters moving, I have asked Aunt Sue to give you some¬ 
thing to puzzle over. The prizes will all be worth work¬ 
ing for—good and new books. Please notice particular¬ 
ly, that this time answers are to be sent to Aunt Sue, and 
not to The Doctor. 
It occurs to me that we need stirring up just a little in 
our puzzle department, and I propose to offer some 
prizes by way of making thiHgs a little more lively. 
Parties lacking patience need not apply. 
We will give six prizes for the best six transpositions 
on the following verse: 
“ With his ice and snow and rime, 
Let bleak Winter sternly come : 
There is not a sunnier clime, 
Thau a love-lit winter home.” 
Use those 94 letters, no more nor less; transpose them 
into different words, then combine the words into a verse 
or connected sentence: the signature (or nom de plume ) 
may be included in the transposition. We shall endeavor 
to give the decision in the July Agriculturist , so com¬ 
munications on the subject must reach me before the 20f/t 
of May. Now don’t go and drive the Doctor raving, dis- 
Iractod, crazy, but send your letters to 
Aunt Sue, Box 111, P. 0., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Tfce Doctor’s Talks—About a Can¬ 
dle. 
Last month we left our candle burning. The heat of 
the flame melted the tallow, wax, or other material of the 
candle, so as to form a nice little cup of liquid candle 
matter, in the center of 
which was the wick, and this 
melted matter arose in the 
wick a short distance to the 
place where it was burned. 
This time we were to inquire, 
41 What makes the liquid rise 
in the wick?”—You 
very well if a drop of 
falls upon your hand it 
stick to it, and no longer 
main a round drop, but will 
spread and wet the hand for pjn-. q,_ slip of glass. 
a considerable distance. A 
drop of quicksilver upon the hand will remain a drop and 
roll around and not wet the hand with quicksilver at all. 
Probably many of you have never seen quicksilver, but 
you can find an illustration of the same thing in the gar¬ 
den. Every boy and girl, in the country at least, must 
have noticed the dew-drops upon a cabbage-leaf, how 
they roll all about, al¬ 
most little balls of wa¬ 
ter, -without once wet¬ 
ting the leaf. Water 
sticks to the hand and 
wets it, while it docs 
not stick to and wet 
the cabbage-leaf. Wa¬ 
ter wets the hand, 
quicksilver does not. 
To put it in other 
words, there is adhesion between the water and the 
surface of the hand, and no adhesion between quicksilver 
and the hand, or between water and the cabbage-leaf. 
Why water will wet some things and not others, or why 
quicksilver will not wet some things and will wet others 
—as you would find out to your sorrow if you should 
handle it while you had a gold ring upon your finger—is 
something that can not be explained. 
It is one of the properties of matter, 
the same as hardness, weight, etc., are. 
One reason that the melted candle 
rises in the wick, is because it can 
adhere to it and wet it. Now let us 
examine this matter a little more. If 
you take apiece of very clean window- 
glass and hold it in water and examine 
closely, you will see that the surface of 
the water where it touches the glass is 
not perfectly level, but the water rises 
up a little upon the glass, as in fig. 1, 
where we are supposed to be looking 
toward the edge of the glass. The wa¬ 
ter seems to have such a liking for the. 
glass that it rises a little to touch it. If you are so fortu¬ 
nate as to have two*bits of glass of the same size—and 
any good-natured glazier will cut them 3 or 4 inches 
square for you out of his broken stock—you can make a 
very pretty experiment. Having your glass thoroughly 
Fig. 2.— TWO PLATES OF 
GLASS. 
clean, you need a thin sliver of wood about as thick as the 
glass itself, and some small twine or coarse thread. Put the 
two pieces of glass together and open them enough to 
put in the sliver of wood, then wind string around at top 
and bottom and tie fast. Then you will have two edges 
of the glass touching each other and opening, like two 
leaves of a book, to the width of your stick. If you are a 
little patient, you can arrange this without 
much difficulty, as shown in fig. 2. If you 
dip the lower edge of the two pieces of glass 
into water, yon will see the water rise up 
between them; it will rise the highest where 
the pieces of glass are nearest together, and 
will diminish as the glasses spread apai't, 
and so form the handsome curve shown in 
the figure. You can sec this tolerably with 
water, but if you use a few spoonfuls of 
milk in a plate it will show so plainly that 
all in the room can see it. After you have 
amused yourself—I mean instructed your¬ 
self, sufficiently with this, take the glasses 
apart, clean them, and put them away, be¬ 
cause sometime you will wish to show this 
very pretty experiment to some friend. Let 
us look at some other illustrations. If you pour water into 
a perfectly clean tumbler or wine-glass and look at it 
carefully, you will see that the liquid crawls a little way 
up the side of the glass, as it did on the surface of the 
window-glass in fig. 1; how it looks is shown in fig. 3; 
the smaller the glass, the more readily will you see the 
rising of the water. If you have a small vial, such as 
medicines are sometimes put in—one of those little fel¬ 
lows no bigger than your finger—you will find that water 
in it, will crawl up the edges, so that its surface will be 
concave, like a watch-crystal, 
as in fig. 4. If you can man¬ 
age to get a small glass tube 
with the bore no larger than 
a knitting-needle and put one 
end in water or milk, you 
will find the liquid to rise 
just as it did between the 
glass plates. As all can not 
readily get glass tubes, I 
give an engraving, fig. 5, to 
show how it does in tubes of 
different sizes. The smaller 
the tube, the higher the 
liquid will rise. If we 
draw down the tubes, as we 
readily can by softening them in a gas flame, so that they 
will be as thin as a hair, liquids will rise in them to the 
higlit of several inches. This was first noticed in small 
tubes, and the force which causes the liquid to rise was 
called capillary attraction , from the Latin capillits, a hair. 
We have already seen, in the case of the window-glass 
(fig. 2), that this rising of a liquid between surfaces is 
not confined to hair-like or any other tubes, but the old 
name is still used to express this attraction of surfaces 
for liquids. Now let us see that this curious effect is not 
confined to flat plates like the window-glass, nor to curved 
surfaces like tubes. If you have an old lamp-chimney, 
Fig. 4. 
Fig. 6.—LAMP-CHIMNEY FILLED WITH EARTH. 
you can make an interesting experiment. Tie over one 
end a piece of cloth of any kind, and then nearly fill the 
chimney with perfectly dry earth. For this purpose put 
some earth in a pan under the stove for a day or two, 
and when it is perfectly dry put it into the chimney and 
shake it down so that it will be well packed together. 
Now contrive some way to hold the chimney upright and 
have its lower end rest in a saucer, as in figure G. Pour 
a little water into the saucer, and wait; soon the water 
will be all gone, and more must be put in. Look at the 
earth in the chimney; a durk portion shows that it has 
been wet by the rising of the water, and if you continue 
to supply sufficient water to the saucer all the dry earth 
will be moistened. I can only just mention what an im¬ 
portant thing this capillary attraction is. You will 
readily see that the earth in the fields and garden acts 
just as that in the lamp-chimney, and when the surface 
moisture is taken up by plants or dried up by the hot sun. 
how more comes up from below to feed the plants. I 
could give many other illustrations of capillary attraction, 
and you have doubtless long ago thought how the melted 
tallow rose in the candle-wick. The wick, with its many 
threads and fibers,may be looked upon as a bundle of small 
tubes, and it is just the thing for taking up liquids. The 
wick in an oil or other lamp shows the force of capillary 
attraction in a more striking manner than does the wick 
of a candle, as the oil is often some inches below the 
place where it is to be burned, and it has to rise all this 
distance through the wick. But I have taken so long in 
trying to show you how the melted tallow rises through 
the short bit of wi k to the place of burning, that I 
shall have to wait until another time before I try to de¬ 
scribe the candle-flame. The Doctor. 
Something to Try sit. —Take a piece of 
stiff paper 214 inches long and 1 and a half inch wide, 
and cut it in such a manner that yon can put your head 
through it. It is very easy if you only hit upon the right 
way of doing it. 
Aunt Sue’s !*iizzle-I5ox. 
NUMERICAL ENIGMA. 
(An easy one.) 
I am composed pf 6 letters. 
My 1, 2, 3 is run by steam. 
My 4, 5, G is what many a little dog is. 
My 3, 2, 6 is a small animal. 
My 1, 2, 6 is its enemy. 
My 4, 5, 2 is a vegetable. 
My 4, 5, 2, 3 is a fruit. 
My 6, 5, 2 is what many take for breakfast. 
My whole is necessary about a well-furnished room. 
Maggie Ashley. 
ABITHMOREMS. 
1. 7250600160250. 4. 1000500100. 
2. 8025010025015250. 5. 6000100150250. 
3. 50010080160. 6. 20001000250. 
John Bright. 
ANAGRAMS. 
1. Soft ones. 
2. No acute lad, I. 
3. Rags oppress H. 
4. Run, see our hats. 
5. That is nice, Ma’am. 
6. Ma sad ? Queer 1 
7. So share toys. 
8. Ice toys. 
9. Ned lost ace. 
1C. I free corn. 
CROSB-WORD. 
My first is in flower but not in bush. 
My next is in shove but not in push. 
My third is in many but not in all. 
My fourth is in boat, but not in yawl. 
My fifth is in lion but not in brute. 
And my whole is n well-known tropical fruit. 
Mary Jacobs. 
blanks. 
(Fill the blanks with words pronounced alike but spelled 
differently.) 
1. The farmer made a-face at the prospect of hi# 
crop of-. 
2. The man inhaled the fumes from the-, and they 
say he wii)-. 
3. I went to the-, and the-was very low. 
4. He --- the-racing through the forest. 
5. I gave her a-and she gave me a quantity of —<• 
for it. 
6. Nobody-how he broke his ——. 
E. M, Brown. 
puzzle. 
a vowel’s vow. 
A simple, honest vowel, as I go, 
What faults my jealous rivals in me find I 
One calls me (1) dumb ; one sneers (2), too slow! 
That often called, as oft (3) I lag behind ; 
Though not in word, yet covertly in sound, 
By one (4) a falsifier I am found, 
Or (5) idle g.ossiper, and worse than that, 
When in the vein, I (6) whine and (7) scratch likecaU 
I vow this perverse alphabet I’ll (8) leave, 
Unless more courtly treatment I receive. 
Tempt. 
AMPUTATIONS. 
1. Behead a Bible name (five letters), transpose, 
leave another. 
2. Behead one insect and leave another. 
3. Curtail a mineral and leave a thorn. 
4. Curtail a flower and leave a servant. 
5. Curtail a fabulous being and leave a small box. 
