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Page 9
But in the arts of practical life we do utilize this force, which is
only inertia.
Once it took a long time for molasses to drain out of a hogshead of
damp sugar. Now it is put into a great tub, with holes in the side,
which is made to revolve rapidly, and the molasses flies out. In the
best laundries clothes are not wrung out, to the great damage of tender
fabrics, but are put into such a tub and whirled nearly dry. So fifty
yards of woolen cloth just out of the dye vat--who could wring it? It
is coiled in a tub called a wizard, and whirled.
Muddy water is put through a process called clarification. It is the
same, except that there are no holes in the vessel. The heavier
particles of dirt, that would settle in time, take the outside, leaving
perfectly clean water in the middle. A perpendicular perforated pipe,
with a faucet below, drains off all the clear water and leaves all the
mud. Milk is brought in from the milking and put into a separator;
whirl it, and the heavier milk takes the outside of the whirling mass,
and the lighter cream can be drawn off from the middle. It is far more
perfectly separated than by any skimming.
A rotary snowplow slices off two feet of a ten-foot drift at each
revolution, and by centrifugal force flings it out of the cutting with
a speed that a hundred navvies or dagos cannot equal.
ONE PLANT HELP
A thousand acres of land on Cape Cod were once blown away. This wind
excavation was ten feet deep. It was not an extraordinary wind, but
extraordinary land. It was made of rock ground up into fine sand by
the waves on the shore.
In all the deserts of the world the wind blows the itinerant sand on
its far journeys. If the wind is moderate it heaps the sand up into
little hills, some of them six hundred feet high, around any
obstruction, and then blows the sand up the slanting face of the hill
and over the top, where it falls out of the wind on the leeward side.
In this way the hill is always traveling. In North Carolina hills
start inland, and travel right on, burying a house or farm if it be in
the way, but resurrecting it again on the other side as the hill goes
on. Anyone may see these hills at the south end of Lake Michigan, as
he approaches Chicago, west of San Francisco, all along up the Columbia
River--the sand having come on the wings of the wind from the coast.
But to see the whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a
really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly
buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of
sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and
harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations
are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the
silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it
is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially
endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of
sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below the Narrows of the harbor
of New York.
How can man combat part of the continent on the move, driven by the
ceaseless powers of the air? By a humble plant or two. The movement
of the sand hills that threaten to destroy the marvelous beauty of the
grounds of the Hotel del Monte at Monterey is stopped by planting dwarf
pines. The sand dunes that prevent much of Holland from being
reconquered by the sea are protected with great care by willows, etc.,
and the coast sands of parts of eastern France have been sown with sea
pine and broom.
The tract of a thousand acres on Cape Cod had been protected by humble
beach grass. Some careless herder let the cows eat it in places, and
away went part of a township. It is now a punishable crime on Cape Cod
to destroy beach grass.
GAS HELP
This refers to more than stump speech-making. The old Romans drove
through solid rock numerous tunnels similar to the one for draining
Lago de Celano, fifty miles east of Rome. This one was three and a
half miles long, through solid rock, and every chip cost a blow of a
human arm to dislodge it. Of course the process was very slow.
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