Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881
Various
Science -- Periodicals
I also noted several scored and polished patches on the
hardest and most enduring of the outswelling rock bosses. This little
island, standing as it does alone out in the Polar Sea, is a fine
glacial monument.
A MIDNIGHT OBSERVATION.
The midnight hour I spent alone on the highest summit, one of the most
impressive hours of my life. The deepest silence seemed to press down
on all the vast, immeasurable, virgin landscape. The sun near the
horizon reddened the edges of belted cloud bars near the base of the
sky, and the jagged ice bowlders crowded together over the frozen
ocean stretching indefinitely northward, while more than a hundred
miles of that mysterious Wrangell Land was seen blue in the
northwest--a wavering line of hill and dale over the white and blue
ice prairie and pale gray mountains beyond, well calculated to fix the
eye of a mountaineer; but it was to the far north that I ever found
myself turning, where the ice met the sky. I would fain have watched
here all the strange night, but was compelled to remember the charge
given me by the captain, to make haste and return to the ship as soon
as I should find it possible, as there was ten miles of shifting,
drifting ice between us and the open sea.
PLANT LIFE ON HERALD ISLAND.
I therefore began the return journey about one o'clock this morning,
after taking the compass bearings of the principal points within sight
on Wrangell Land, and making a hasty collection of the flowering
plants on my way. I found one species of poppy, quite showy, and
making considerable masses of color on the sloping uplands, three or
four species of saxifrage, one silene, a draba, dwarf willow,
stellaria, two golden compositae, two sedges, one grass, and a
veronica, together with a considerable number of mosses and lichens,
some of them quite showy and so abundant as to form the bulk of the
color over the gray granite.
INHABITANTS OF THE CLIFFS.
Innumerable gulls and murres breed on the steep cliffs, the latter
most abundant. They kept up a constant din of domestic notes. Some of
them are sitting on their eggs, others have young, and it seems
astonishing that either eggs or the young can find a resting place on
cliffs so severely precipitous. The nurseries formed a lively
picture--the parents coming and going with food or to seek it,
thousands in rows standing on narrow ledges like bottles on a grocer's
shelves, the feeding of the little ones, the multitude of wings, etc.
* * * * *
M. Bouchut's experiments with pepsine for destroying worms in the
stomach and bowels have been continued with extremely promising
results. Even the tapeworm succumbs to the digestive action of pepsine
in large doses, while the more highly organized tissues of the stomach
are unaffected.
* * * * *
FRANZ LISZT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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