Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1899: Volume LVI, No. 1
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Wireless telegraphy is the nearest approach to telepathy that has
been vouchsafed to our intelligence, and it serves to stimulate our
imagination and to make us think that things greatly hoped for can be
always reached, although not exactly in the way expected. The nerves
of the whole world are, so to speak, being bound together, so that a
touch in one country is transmitted instantly to a far-distant one. Why
should we not in time speak through the earth to the antipodes? If the
magnetic waves can pass through brick and stone walls and sand hills,
why should we not direct, so to speak, our trumpet to the earth,
instead of letting its utterances skim over the horizon? In regard
to this suggestion, we know certainly one fact from our laboratory
experiences: that these magnetic waves, meeting layers of electrically
conducting matter, like layers of iron ore, would be reflected back,
and would not penetrate. Thus a means may be discovered through the
instrumentality of such waves of exploring the mysteries of the earth
before success is attained in completely penetrating its mass.
EMIGRANT DIAMONDS IN AMERICA.
BY PROF. WILLIAM HERBERT HOBBS.
To discover the origin of the diamond in Nature we must seek it in
its ancestral home, where the rocky matrix gave it birth in the form
characteristic of its species. In prosecuting our search we should very
soon discover that, in common with other gem minerals, the diamond has
been a great wanderer, for it is usually found far from its original
home. The disintegrating forces of the atmosphere, by acting upon the
rocky material in which the stones were imbedded, have loosed them from
their natural setting, to be caught up by the streams, sorted from
their disintegrated matrix, and transported far from the parent rock,
to be at last set down upon some gravelly bed over which the force of
the current is weakened. The mines of Brazil and the Urals, of India,
Borneo, and the "river diggings" of South Africa either have been or
are now in deposits of this character.
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