The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900Various
Science
The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1900: Vol. 57, May, 1900 to October, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
chair in which the hero sat during the review, or to fight for shreds
of the flags and awnings that decorated the platform.
Sporadic social reform movements take the form of crazes and
illustrate the same laws. One recalls the Woman’s Crusade in 1873,
the result not of a rational plan but of imitation, and the Granger
movement and the Farmers’ Alliance and the greenback craze and the
silver craze and many others.
Since Aristotle we have been told that man is a social animal and that
to study him as he really is we must not isolate him from society. The
evident truth of this may lead us to forget that it is but a half truth
and the uncritical acceptance of it will lead us wholly astray in our
sociological study. The inference which we seem compelled to draw from
studies in social psychology is that social man is, in his ethical
and intellectual development, many stages behind the individual man.
The progress of civilization is a slow, painful, upward climbing, in
which individuals are the thinkers, the planners, the promoters and
the leaders. The mind of society, on the other hand, using the phrase
in the sense defined, is an imitative, unreflective, half-hypnotic,
half-barbaric mind, always acting as a drag upon the upward and forward
movement, and, in times of crazes, epidemics and social cataclysms,
gaining temporary dominance and causing disastrous relapses to a lower
plane of civilization.
SOME PHASES OF THE EARTH’S DEVELOPMENT IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT CHEMICAL
RESEARCH.
BY PROFESSOR EDWARD RENOUF.
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.
In the following pages an effort is made to apply some of the results
of recent chemical research to the earlier history of the earth. It is
hoped that the main facts brought out may be readily grasped by those
who have never studied chemistry, and that each link in the chain of
events will be made evident to those who have mastered the rudiments of
this science.
Chemical action involves change of composition. Substances more or
less complex may be broken down into simpler substances, or from
several simpler substances a complex substance may be built up. From
the complex ore of copper found in nature the simple element copper is
obtained. From the elements sulphur and oxygen and the simple substance
water the complex sulphuric acid is built up. Within the last few
years the high temperature of the electric arc--the heat generated
by a powerful electric current playing between two carbon poles--has
been employed in bringing about chemical changes which do not occur
at ordinary temperatures nor at those obtainable by burning fuel. The
electric furnace is used industrially to make calcium carbide from lime
and coke, carbon silicide (carborundum) from coke and sand, and the
metal aluminum from its compounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account