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HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1951-11-22, Page 3Red Scientist Says World Warming Up A dispatch from Moscow spreads the news that Soviet astrophysicists have accepted the declaration of Dr. Otto Yullievich Schmidth, famous Russian Arctic explorer, that the world is warming up. The theory is said- to have originated with Schmidt and is hailed as "a great advance of history, showing that Soviet science is ahead of the science of other countries in this field." Dr. Schmidt is a man of parts, a good mathematician and an explorer whose feats in the Arctic regions are unique. But he is not the first to maintain that the world is grow- ing warmer. Nor is Soviet climato- logy ahead of climatology in all other countries. The evidence that the world is warming up has been piling up for decades, and the met- eorologists of the West have not ignored it. A thousand years ago Greenland was a flourishing Norse colony with a population of about 10,000. 13y 1500 few farmsteads were left, Whether or not a change of climate drove the colonists away nobody knows, That the climate of Green- land did change is certain. Tree roots that forced their way through bones in cemeteries tell the story. Back in 1830 the mean annual temperature of Philadelphia was 52 elegrees F.; a century later it was 56 degrees. Similar increases in temperature are reported in the meteorological records of Montreal, Spitzbergen, the British Isles, Washington, D.C., and other places. The biggest changes in temper- ature and precipitation have been noted in the Arctic, sub -Arctic and temperate zones. In Siberia, frozen ground is gradually receding toward the' pole. Fish once unknown in cold waters are now caught as far north at Latitude 73 degrees, There are many explanations of these climatic changes, Cycles of mountain -building and degradation, variations in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit or the obliquity of the ecliptic, minor changes in the dis- tribution of land and water, long - period variations in solar activity, the passing of the earth through cosmic dust, wobbling of the earth's poles, an dthe almost imperceptible drifting of• the continents—all have been invoked to account for chang- es that were noted long before Soviet scientists were heard from on the weather and climate. ANSWERED "Jimmy," said his mother, 'run across the street and see how old Mrs. Smith is." Jimmy was back in a few min- utes. "She says it's none of your business how old she is." Marked Child --Lady Grevy, a • zebra at the zoo, poses with her first offspring, a daughter. Born shortly before the picture was taken, the striped young- ster was taking her first steps minutes later. DESIGNERS STRIVE FOR LIGHT, AIRY EFFECTS INDOORS A glow of outside radiance Is brought into a room when windows are hung with new venetian blinds with softly -tinted slats of a lately devel- oped translucent plastic, ET EDNA MWES': IN this' era of home -decorating, which stresses color and bright- ness for interiors, furnishings and accessory designers seem to be vying one with the other to see what new creation for adding lightness and airiness can next be contributed. The outdoors is brought`'indoors, in effect, with a brand-new kind of coffee table which features a plexiglass aquarium as lit$ base, In this may be kept fish, green plants or fresh flowers, according to the home decorator's whim. A removable plate glass; makes the aquarium handily accessible. Light is again captured as a decorating aid in new venetian blinds which add a mellow radi- ance to the rooms they adorn. The secret of this magic is a new trans- lucent slat of a special plastic which obscures the outside, but at the . same time allows enough light to come through to bathe the room in a glow of color, These blinds, which are avail- able in a number of soft shades to harmonize with your own color schemes, are said by their makers to be easier to keep cleat), since their smooth sleek surfaces have no minute pits for dust catching. Worry about chipping of the blinds is also eliminated, since the color Is an integral part of the slats, which are of extreme flexibility. Refecting the charm of aro outdoor garden pool is this coffee table which features an aquarium base of Lucite and a cover of airy-appearinf removable plate glass, Some truly startlicw facts—facts of great importance to every one of us—were brought out in a paper recently presented to the American Geophysical Union by Leon Las- sen and E. N. Munns, * * * The paper was entitled "Vegeta- tion and.,Frozen Soils." Briefly sum- med up its findings were that all soils don't form the same kind of ice when they freeze; soils rich in organic matter form porous, honeycomb ice that soaks up run- off water and prevents erosion; and that wornout, hard soils freeze into rock -like ice that penetrates deeper and thaws later in the spring. * * * Practical applications of this soil - ice study are important and far- reaching. The facts turned up may even throw light on the origin of spring floods that cause vast loss- es to farmers every year. Such floods may be controlled if some way can be found to govern the type of ice that forms on farmers' fields. Many frozen soil investigations were made in New England during the winter of 1946 by Lassen and a colleague. The impervious, con- crete ,type of ice was found in fields that ad been cultivated and were low in organic matter. Spongy ice was found in meadows and fields which had a higher humus content. * :x * Traditional opinions regarding frozen soil are being proved false by these studies. It is not true that all frozen soil will not soak up water or that all soils freeze or thaw at the same time. Fertile fields and woodlands may he free of ice at the same time that poor land is frozen solid and is repelling flood waters. * * * The fact that soil under light grass does not freeze as readily as bare soil was proved by Henry W. Anderson in 1947, * * * But most important is the type BY HAROLD ARNETT !scARDED BRACKETS LlsED SUPPORT' WtNDOW-SHAOE I OLL5R MAY GB t1SEC1 1'O MAKE 6'1"URDY HANGERS FOR HEAVY PICTURES. HAM MGR THEM FLAT AN QCRVt TO AC( O1 FRAME. of ice that does forum in cold weather. Concrete ice that forms on poor soil is a very real flood menace. Honeycomb ice, on the other hand, causes no trouble to farmers. * * * Soil and water authorities have in the past stressed the relationship between the falling organic matter content of U.S. soils (four to 1.5 per cent in 200 years) and increas- ing flood damage. There is little doubt that farmers, who suffer most from floods, can stop rampaging waters before they start. * 4 * Putting more organic matter into the soil and grasses on top of it is the way to do it. * The practice of artificial insemi- nation of cattle is distinctly in- creasing in Great Britain; in fact, according to latest reports, practi- cally one-quarter of all their cattle over there are now bred artificially. * * :k Joseph Edwards, head of the Milk Marketing Board's Production Divi- sion, said that membership in arti- ficial breeding centres was 70,966 from April, 1950, to March, 1951, compared with 59,908 in 1949-50. Cows inseminated totalled 567,102 against 431,370. Each one of the Board's twenty- two centres showed progress during the year. The Carmarthen Centre, with its 9,300 members and 65,000 cows inseminated is probably the largest in Britain. Tarporley, Cheshire, has 4,100 members (41,800 cows inseminated) and Cheswardine, Shropshire, 4,500 members (40,600 cows inseminat- ed). In Norfolk and Suffolk, the Beccles Centre inseminated 40 cows out of every 100. In Cornwall and East Devon, the Praze and Honi- ton Cylst Centres inseminated ap- proximately 45 per cent of the cows in their areas; these two centres were started less than three years ago. BIG SMOKE An Indian in New Mexico not far from the site of atomic bomb experiments, was using smoke sig- nals to broadcast a hymn of hate to his enemy: Threats, epithets and general imprecations swirled sky- ward as fast as he could manipu- late the code. Suddenly a black cloud shot up on his horizon, mushrooming with awful speed to blanket the sky. The Indian drop- ped to his haunches, utterly de- feated. "Gosh," he said with' envious admiration, "I wish I'd said that." He Didn't Want People ToLike.- The morning the poet Swinburne died, at 10 a.m. on April 10th, 1909, I made a pilgrimage across Wim- bledon. Common to the Rose and Crown where the great titan used to take his celebrated morning glass of beer. I took a horse -bus back, sat on the front seat with the driver, who gave me his esti- mate of Swinburne. "He' was a very little man, thin, too, but with a great big head," he said. f'He never wore an overcoat— snow, hail, or wet—and he never looked what you'd call a gentleman. He weuldn't speak to anyone at all, especially women. It was only chil- dren he'd take any notice of. He'd always speak to a baby in a pram— but if the nurse so much as looked at him he'd be off at once!" The mother of Algernon Charles was Lady Jane Swinburne, daugh- ter of the third Earl of Ashburn- ham—his father an admiral, with private means. Swinburne himself went to Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Coming down in 1859, he leapt into fame` as the most electri- fying and passionate of romantic poets at a period when be was in competition with Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Coventry Patmore, James Thomp- son and Edward Fitzgerald. The critics were for the most part horrified at the naked sensu- ality of his imagery, muttering in their beards about police interven- tion. But the aesthetes of Chelsea, the intellectuals of Bloomsbury, and the uppercrust intelligentsia of St. John's Wood and Hampstead took him instantly to thea hearts, Indiscreet Letters Swinburne's looks as a young man greatly enchanted his legend as a "second Shelley," for he was small and slight, quick and nervous. White -skinned, green-eyed, his spa- cious forehead was surmounted by long, silky, bright red hair, the colour scheme being filled by a pret- ty poetic moustache and toy -like wisp of beard. He likewise dressed for the part iu floppy bows, velve- teen jackets, and so forth. • He was traditionally the unfet- tered genius, too, in his contempt for conventional morality. He was not merely indifferent to unpopular- ity, but went out looking for it. He was a confirmed dipsomaniac, frequently an invalid through his excesses. By innuendo, by infer- ence, by his known intimacy with those two drug addicts, Baudelaire and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he was tarred with their, brush as regards that vice and he gloried in procaim- ing himself a disciple of sadism. His spectacular affair with "11iaz- eppa,'' the bareback -rider and ar- tist's model, alias Aclah Isaacs Men - ken, five times a wife—apart from being notoriously the mistress of the great Dumas and others less famous—was common knowledge owing to Swinburne and the lady being photographed together and copies being exhibited all over Lon- don. :\ll this publicity was, of course, most distressing to Swin- burne's devoted parents. Time and aga'n they paid off their wayward son's debts and nursed him back to health after prolonged bouts of dis- sipation, They even, out of affec- tion, kept him short of money—the only effective niethod of curtailing his profligacy. The steadying influence they had so long hoped for on his behalf arrived in 1879, when Swinburne was forty-two and was introduced to a Huntingdonshire solicitor and hanger-on to the skirts of the arts named Theadore Watts, (later Watts -Dunton) a man five years Swinburne's senior, To Watts, the provincial bour- geois, Swinburne's upper-class ori- gin was alone a matter for rever- ence, apart front his literary ach- ievements, But the advantages were by no means on one side. Watts was reliable and respectable; Swinburne irresponsible and disre- putable. Watts was a professional man of affairs; Swinburne barren of the foggiest idea of business. A solicitor -friend was invaluable also when, upon the death of Ros- setti, Fanny Schott, the' deceased's last mistress, found among his ef- fects correspondence from Swin- burne so blatantly indecent that she considered the writer might prefer to pay a large suns sooner than let his indiscretions fall into the handle of the police or Press. In many ways Watt was the ideal companion and guardian of Swinburne. 13y the sale of the ad- miral's library, Lady Jane was able to contribute R1,000 towards the setting up of a joint establishment, The Pines, a commonplace villa at the foot of Putney Hill. There, for the thirty years that elapsed be - for his death, Swinburne remained in not unwilling subjection to his mentor, A Friend Indeed By this time drugs were unob- tainable, and drink only sparingly during his invariable two hours' ramble over Putney and Wimble- don Commons. In time Watts even trained him to be clean and tidy, positively calm, instead of an 'hys- terical, dishevelled, ink -stained Bo- hemian with St. Vitas's dance, house ed itt a pig -sty of unsorted manu- scripts. Much time was devoted to the study of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists, and apart from his three learned volumes on this subject Swinburne issued from Putney a nuzneber of poetic trage- dies of his own, numerous volumes of verse and a novel. But for Watts drink and drugs would undoubtedly have brought the tveakling to an early grave; the kind of wild marriage he in his needless, giddy, .unpractical way would have contracted might well have landed him in far worse places than The Pines, Latterly very deaf, he lived more in exile than ever. But to the very last the sight of a little child would wrinkle his face in smiled, especially if it were a new-born infant; for about these elites he was always ready to rhap- sodize with the same exaltation which had at one time fired him when he wrote of the sea. He died at Putney of pneutnon• ia, the result of walking on the common in the rain without an an overcoat, and was buried itt the Isle of Wight, among the tombs of his ancestors, within sound of his well -beloved sea, From "Tit -Bits HERE'S ISOCALT 4 JENNY HAS AN AWFUL SQUINT,. EVERY TIME SHE READS SMALL PRINT WEARING GLASSES WOULD SE WISE; THEY'D HELP HER GOOD LOOKS AND HER EYES, Dept. of ilationaf Health and Welfare ee *rums, t ., Dry -Cleaning ,lob—It beats the old wet wash -tub, thinks puke, pet pup belonging to young Mark Buck, But Duke still isn't too fond of a cleaning job, even when it's done with a modern vacuum cleaner. JITTER tT., TIME To PANT THE BOAT ANo tAntecH Hf R,GAN9.... BOY E CAN'T WAIr'Po OET'THAT SEA AIR IN MY / Pte/ ,. IP YOU WANT TO tig A RMe,L. SAILOR YOU'LL HAVE To t EARN HOW TO PUT' A BOAT 1N SHAPE! '�NERL'$ LESSON ONE .JUST TAKE THIS scRApi R AND....... YES SIR... MING UP YauR oWN 1 OA'r Is HALF THE FUN a SAILING!