Some Curious Facts

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Aug 7, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 30.

Some Curious Facts.

GOLD-BEATERS, by hammering, can reduce gold leaves so thin that 282,000 must be laid upon each other to produce the thickness of an inch, yet each leaf is so perfect and free from holes that one of them laid upon any surface, as in gilding, gives the appearance of solid gold. They are so thin that if formed into a book, 1,500 would only occupy the space of a single leaf of common paper; and an octavo volume of an inch thick, would have as many pages as the books of a well-stocked library of 1,500 volumes, with 400 pages in each. Still thinner than this is the coating of gold upon the silver wire of what is called gold lace, and we are not sure that such coating is not of only one atom thick. Platinum and silver can be drawn into wire much finer than human hair. A grain of blue vitriol of carmine will tinge a gallon of water, so that in every drop the color may be perceived. A grain of musk will scent a room for twenty years, and will, at the end of that period, have lost little of its weight. The carrion crow smells its food many miles off. A burning taper, uncovered for a single instant, during which it does not lose one-thousandth of a grain, would fill with light a sphere four miles in diameter, so as to be visible in every part of it. The thread of the silk-worm is so small that many of them are twisted together to form the finest sewing thread; but that of the spider is smaller still, for two drams of it by weight would reach from London to Edinburgh, or 400 miles. In the milt of a codfish, or in water in which vegetables have been infused, the microscope discovers animalculæ of which many thousands together do not equal in bulk a grain of sand; and yet nature with a singular prodigality, has supplied many of these with organs as complete as those of the whale or the elephant, and their bodies consist of the same substance, or ultimate atoms, as that of man himself. In a single pound of such matter there are more living creatures than of human beings on the face of the globe. What a scene has the microscope opened to the admiration of the philosophic inquirer.—Cassell's Saturday Journal.