On the Progress of Science

ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. NOTES CONTRIBUTED FOR THE "IMPROVEMENT ERA" BY THE FACULTY OF SCIENCE, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, AND EDITED BY DR. JOHN A. WIDTSOE. Rubber From Wheat. William T. Walsh, in the Technical World magazine for December, states that a substance chemically identical with India- rubber may be made from wheat, and that a process has been arrived at for its manufacture. The wheat has to be treated with ptyalin, 'the active ferment of the saliva of the mouth. Thus far they are able to find no substitute for this ferment. It is proposed to get the ptyalin from the hog. Six grades of cereal rubber can be made, ty interrupting the action of the ptyalin at the proper time. Among the uses to which these various grades of rubber may be put, are mentioned the fol- lowing: for waterproofing; for tubes and other flexible material; for tires; as a substitute for linoleum; for paving purposes. Already a movement is started in England to push the manu- facture of this new product. It is estimated that the cereal rub- ber will be sold much cheaper than the natural rubber. It was by mere accident that W. I. Carr, an Englishman, first got the suggestion, which led to this great discovery. One day, while walking through a grain field, and chewirg some of the wheat, he noticed the glutinous compound produced. The active ferment of the saliva acts on the starch, changing it into dextrose,

470 IMPROVEMENT ERA. and this, by proper treatment, acquires the characteristics of rubber. Need of a State Pure Food Bill. Beginning with last January, articles of food must be passed on before they can be sold outside the state in which they are pro- duced. Also patent medicines must bear a statement on the out- side of the bottle, showing exactly the ingredients. But this regulation does not apply to the sale of the food or the medicine in the state in which it is made. Candy made and sold in our own state may be colored with coal-tar dye, olive oil may consist largely of cottonseed oil, benzoic acid may be used as a preservative in canned fruit, and all without the interference of the national pure food bill. What we'really need is a state pure food and patent medicine law. North Dakota has already set the example. Attraction at a Distance, Hew can one body attract another at a distance? Is attrac- tion at a distance consistent with our ordinary ideas of the proper- ties of matter? Or again, does a body actually attract a distant one? Because a stone always falls to the earth, because one magnet suspended even in a vacuum always turns around at the approach of another magnet; because one electrically charged body is always repelled by a similar one, shall we go on saying, and be contend with saying, as the older generation said, ''These things attract each other?" These are words of little meaning, behind which we hide our ignorance of the manner in which all ether phenomena occur. Some there are who are content to stop here, to be satisfied with the fact that there appears to be a repulsion or an attraction between two distant bodies or electric charges, or electric cur- rents, and to say that all is said, that these apparent attractions are real and cannot be explained in terms of anything simpler. Orson Pratt seems to have been unsatisfied with an "explanation" which expressed the facts without explaining them, for in his essay on "The Great First Cause," he propounded a theory of a self- moving matter, which gave the appearance only of attraction. He insisted that it was absurd to speak of a particle acting, where it is not, or across empty space. Whatever the difficulties of his

ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 471 own theory, he certainly agreed with later thought in his dissatis- faction with the use of the pretentious word "attraction" as an explanation. Modern science is doing the very thing formerly thought im- possible. It is explaining these apparent attractions in terms of something simpler. The something simpler is the kind of action that one particle of any ordinary elastic body can produce upon another particle of that same body at some distance from the first. If you take hold of a rope which is hanging from the ceiling, and give it a pull, the force is passed from the lowest to the highest point of the rope, and thus the lowest particles attract the high- est, but only by the intervention oj the particles between them. The force is passed along the rope in a perfectly continuous and grad- ual manner. Each particle pulls on the one above it, wh; ch in turn pulls on the one above it, until the pull is handed on to the highest point. In a perfectly analogous manner, according to modern views, the transmission of gravitational, electrical and magnetic, in a word, ether-forces, takes place. All the apparent "attractions" and "repulsions" of electric and magnetic charges can be explained as being produced by stresses in aa all-pervading ether, in which we live and move and have our being. These stresses are similar to those which hold together all the small particles which compose a stone or a block of wood. More than this, the stresses which produce what we have called attractions have actually been calculated in every case, in terms of the electric or magnetic charges, the electric currents or the attracting matter which give rise to them. Thus the study of light, gravitation, and electro-magnetism, brings us by diverse pathways face to face with one and the same medium, the ether, —avast, shoreless sea, on which the planets ride; whose waves of stress and strain and pressure, cross and in- tercross and are superposed, speeding through space with enor- mous velocity, until they disperse and die away in the boundless, unknown, and it may be to us unknowable, regions of universal space. And it is to a knowledge of the properties of this myste- rious substance that man may look for a key to some of the choi- cest mysteries of the heavens and the earth. — Chester Snow, A.B. Provo, Utah.