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y er, - pointe' Bra is x EL SHA 51 2% Had 5 ORR RRR A Relative Sizes Of Sun, Earth, Moon What is the diameter of the moon in comparison with' the earth and sun? When we see the sun and the moon in the sky, they appear to be about the same size! But, as Sir Harold Spencer-Jones, the Astron- omér Royal, expains, we cannot form any idea of their real sizes merely from their appearance in the sky. He said; "There is actually a 'very great difference in "size between the sun and the moon. The moon is consid- erably smaller than the earth, the sun is very much larger. The dia- meter of the sun is 109 times that of the earth, whereas the diameter of the moon is little more than one quarter of that of the earth; the diameter of the sun is about 400 times greater than that of the moon, We should expect, therefore, that the distance of the sun from the earth would be about 400 times greater than the distance of the moon, This is very nearly correct. - "It is quite a chance coincidence that the ratio of the true siz€s of the sun and the moon is so nearly equal to the ratio of their mean dis- tances, It might so, easily have been different; if the moon had been nearer to the. earth than it is, 'it would have appeared to be smaller than the sun." "When the sun, the moon and. the earth are exactly in a straight line, with the moon between the sun and the earth, it is possible, but only Just possible, for the moon com- platen to obscure the sun, We then ave the unique spectacle of a total eclipse of the sun, when the outer appendage of the sun, known as the gorona, can be seen extending out from the sun for a distance of about two million miles, shining with a early glow. It is one of the most ascinating sights to be seen, though unfortunately one of the rarest, for when such an eclipse occurs it is visible from only a narrow belt of the earth's surface. But ,when the sun, moon, and earth are in a line, a total eclipse does not always take place. If the moon at the time is near its greatest distance from the earth, its apparent size is a little smaller than that of 'the sun. The sun, at mid-eclipse, then appears as 8 narrow ring of light surrounding / the moon." y Dogs Destroy Half Million Sheep Yearly . The dingo is a fierce, wild dog whose origin is obscure. Some zoo- 'logists link him: with 'the primitive wild dog of India, and they think he. came down to Australia as the companion of primitive man. One - theory is that both aboriginal man and dingo came across what is now the chain of islands between Malaya and Taree Straits. These islands are believed to have been a continuous land-link with Asia until compar- atively recent times--recent, that is, geologically speaking. At any rate, dingo got in. : He is a handsome, intelligent, and sunning creature, about the. size of a wolf, and, like the wolf, he howls at night and does not bark. He has enormously powerful jaws, and he destroys sheep as ryuch for _ the sake of killing as for fdod. It is estimated that a single dingo can * destroy $5,000 worth of sheep in a night. As long ago as 1923, Queensland debited the dingo with a loss of 250,000 sheep in the twelve months, An estimate of last year's losses is 800,000. The rate of loss has gone up. with declining man-power,. es- pecially during and since the war, , Another reason is the extreme scarcity of wire in Australia; pro- duction is much less thar before the war, That is why many pasturalists say that Queensland's proposal for a protective wire fence could not be carried out for a very long time, In' any case, such a fence would take about six ycars to build and cost nearly $2,500,000, And, of course, it would "need a permanent patrol of men to keep it in efficient condition, . There has been much argument in récent years about whether the dingo would cross with the domestic dog; many people say most dingos arc mongrels, and, even, that Aus- tralia's best-known cattle dog has a strain of dingo in him, It is also out that the uniformity of dingo skulls which have, so fdr, been scientifically examined is evi- dence that the dingo does not mix, One writer has described the dingo as the purest-bred dog in the world, Ain ppl areniidin Merry Menagerie--By Walt Disney here?" Fe Six ILE Sin ot Elauihs ay FAT Ele A Prince Can Laugh By Richard Hil Wilkinson A week after | established resi- dence in Seabrook, Ray Quimper, my next door neighbor took time off to drive me around the town and show me the points of interest. Toward "evening he stopped his car before a driveway that led up to a huge brick house on top of Drybridge Hill. It was the only brick building in town and could be seen for miles around, I had won- dered about it since the day of my arrival. "The home of Prince Alexander Moisevich eborin," he explained. -I looked at him curiously, sensing that this was a proud moment for Ray, He had saved the brick house until last, like a child relishing the last morsel. ? "Of course," Ray explained. fur- ther "he has a city home too. But the fact is he spends the greater part of his time out here. He craves solitude." tH "Are you sure? | mean; wouldn't it be fitting to let the man know you're glad to have him as a citi- zen?" "We've tended to that," Ray said importantly, "Three days after his arrival a committee made up of leading citizens. waited on the prince and extended him a formal welcome." He regarded me sagely. "We're smart enough not to an- tagonize the man by pestering him to: death." On the day of which I write I was removing storm windows from my house, for spring was near and the day was bright and warm. The prince came strolling along my street and stopped, oddly enough, at the end of my drive to watch. I percieved him from the corner of my eye, though gave no indication that I had 'seen. After a momen or two, much to my satisfaction, he turned In at the.drive and came slowly toward me. At this precise : moment the stepladder on which I was standing tilted precariously and the window I was removing threat- ened to tumble to the ground. I uttered a cry of alarm, turned, ordteyed the prince as If for the rat time, and shouted to him for aid. Involuntarily, he leaped for- ward and steadied the ladder until - I. had descended. "Phew!" I grinned. "That was & elose call" "It was indeed," he replied. "Would you mind holding the lad- der for me on this window over He seemed a little sur- prised, but agreed to lend his as- sistance. He proved as good a helper<as 1 cotild have asked for. Three windows I removed while he steadied the ladder and helped me lower them to the ground. We . chatted amiably about the weather. Presently the task was done and I turned to him, grinning. "Thanks a lot. I don't know how I would have managed without you." "Really?" He seemed to appreci- ate my compliment, "Frankly, I've enjoyed it, not only tife work, but our little visit." He hesitated. "You are new in town, aren't you?" "Comparatively," I said, "It's a mighty nice town, Folks are all like yourself. Ready and willing to lend a hand when help is needed." I smiled happily. "The fact that I know your name, Prince Alexan- der," proves a little theory of my own." He stared in astonishment. "You know who I am? You knew when you asked me to help remove the windows?" I nodded. "Your philosophy and mine have a good deal in common, Prince. And that is, that you're no "different from the rest of us. I'd even venture to say that you are quite unhappy living up there in your castle so far removed from everybody. To prove that I am right, I'm going to ask you a ques- tion. Tomorrow I'm going fishing. How would you like to come along?" "I'd like to very much," he said. "But we must keep it a secret from the rest of the people. It would be a pity to destroy their illusion." I agreed, winking at him know= ingly, and the prince and [ then and there shared a hearty laugh. Men To Judge Home Baking For the first time in the C.N.E.'s history, the judges for the home- baking competitions will be menl And because the top prize in the apple pie contest is $100, Mrs. Kate Aitken, C.N.E, Women's Director, has scoured the country for the, group of men best able to pick the best cake and pie out of at least hundreds. She has invited the mem- bers of the Ontario Bakery Pro- dyction Men's Club. They will sume from Hamilton, London, Bowman- ville, Brantford and Toronto. All 16 male judges will have to sample hundreds of apple pies, fruit bread, 'white bread, date and nut loaves, angel cakes, shortbread and all the other varieties of home- baking that attract the attention of . thousands at the C.N.E. each ycar, So far most entries are for the $100 apple pie. Butter tarts are next in ¢ popularity among contestants, with brag muffins, third, and white bread, fourth. How Edgar Bergen Got His Start Edgar Bergen made his radio debut in 1936 when he managed to engineer an audition for the guest spot on the Rudy Vallee program. The sponsor declared audibly that anybody who thought a ventrilo- quist could hold a #adio audience's attention was screwy as a bird dog. "Bergen was so nervous that he al- most dropped his precious Charlie McCarthy and muffed several lines in the scrip. The sponsor chortled derisively. An. assistant waved a copy of the 'scrip, at Bergen and said, "Here's your place." Bergen nodded and the assistant moved away, "Hey," yelled Charlie, "lat me have a gander at that scrip." The young man wheeled about and unthinkingly thrust the scrip before the wooden dummy's eyes. The sponsor stared at the spectacle, mut- tered "I'll be dgmned," and ordered, "Make out a contract for the guy." The Turtle The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks Which practically. conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile. --OQOgden Nash They Taste Things Why do house flies get into the: molasses? Because, say a couple of bug experts, they taste with their feet. Dr. Hubert W, Frings, associate rofessor of zoology, and his wife, abel Frings,' found in intensive research that the 'end segments of the legs of flies were taste organs. They - also learned that -the shorter hairs of the pads on the end of the proboscis are taste or- gans. The longer hairs are used as: sense of touch" organs. House flies were only one of 28 species of insects examined by Dr, Frings and hjs wife in their study of taste habits. Possible taste organs of the in sects were touched with fine glass needles, bearing either water, sugar solutions, or a salt solution, after control tests were made. Cockroaches, taste with their' feet, were found to have taste organs in three other places--on feeler-like appendages protruding from the 'mouth parts, on a fold on the floor of the mouth} and a part of the lip. The roaches paid no attention to sugar water when shese organs were removed. But they were able to find dog biscuit or other food parcticles. Re oarently" Dr. Frings com- "mented, "they havé a keen sense of smell." | bios be : Ri : : while * unable to: With Their Feet Taste Test on cockroach: Not like a fly's foot. . fren There's A Boom In Barn Painting--DPainting the barn is no longer the chore it used to be. developed this aerial telescipic boom which eliminates ladders : and scaffolding. Now it's a one-man job. 'THEFARM FRONT dr Bussell I wouldn't know how to pro-- nounce It and if it wasn't writtea plain and clear on the sheet in front of me, how to spell it. Anyway, the word is "chemurgy" and, according to the same sheet it means "that branch of applied chemistry devoted to "industrial utilization 'of organic materials, especially farm products." . » . --judging from the general tenor of the communication--we would take it that they should be credited with at least an assist. Personally, we like our potatoes French fried, culls or not; and whenever we think of white starch there comes a re membrance of a Chink laundrymaa who used to take a mouthful of it, spray it over a shirt he was working Noah Webster, and all the rest of on, and then iron the bosom to a you dictionary makers, move over. high, glossy shine. I think I've had it! . «oe. * . . But we are getting far astray Anyway, it seems like these from our point, if any, And in the chemurgic chemists have been mak- next paragraph we are thrilled to ing history, although that's no boost see a mention of this wonderful because so did Hitler. They took a Dominion of ours--the greatest look around and saw that prairie country in the world, populated by farmers were setting fire to millions the most forward-looking and intel- of tons of straw every year, and it ligent people ever known, although worried them, Georke Drew and George McCul- . * . lough would probably have some So what did two of them do but mental reservations to that last clause. get busy and develop a new method of processing wheat straw into high- grade paper and pulp-board. This, a their press agents inform me, will A spray-painting service has «a "In Canada," it states here, "the national chemurgic committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Has X-Ray Eyes 19-year-old South African stu- dent has recently caused-a sensa- tion with his "X-ray eyes" which enabled him to "see" water, gold and oil in the form of light rays. What is the secret of this strange faculty? Probably very much the same power as that possessed by the water-diviners of old and the "dowsers" as they are now called. Dowsing is now believed by many otherwise orthodox scientists to be a purely physical response to radia- tion, the reaction being caused not by water but by oll, minerals, archaeological relics, and even being used to determine the sex of eggs. The theory is that everything has its own wavelength and that the skilled dowser is & person sufficiently susceptible to those radiations to be able to act as a kind of "receiving set". Certainly: the famed Japanese chick-sexers now have strong rivals in these people who, by suspending something personal like & wedding ring on a piece of cotton over the eggs, can with a. high degree /of accuracy determine their fertility and sex of the unhatched chicks. There are also dowsers who claim to be able to determine both the sex and personality of a person from a photograph and to state . whether the individual is alive or dead. Others undertake to locate water, mineral deposits and ancient relics by hanging their pendulum over a map of the. district] There is even a French shoemaker who tests the quality of a hide in this way before buying it. The best leathers apparently produce rays which are djrected due north, so If you are dolbtful about your new lum over them! There is nothihg so fantastic about the boy with the X-ray eyes. His "divining" faculties are, no doubt, more highly dewnloped than the dowsers who still work either with a rod or with a bead suspended on a fine. thread, to which Is trans- mittted the vibrations set up in the muscles of the arm. Recent Floods In Australia The area worst affected by the flood waters was in the north of the' state where the Hunter River broke its banks and four towns had to be evacuated. In the vicinity of Mait- land, Singleton, and Cessnock five inches of rain fell in one day, and the river rose forty-five feet. Com- munications broke down, and some areas were Spplstsly isolated. Several families sat on the roofs of their homes waiting to be rescued by police boats, and at Maitland forty people lived in motor 'buses parked on the railway bridge near the station, With the lack of milk, meat, and fresh vegetables, there was a run on tinned foods, and many of the stores which normally stock these goods, stacked to the ceiling, dis- played "Sold Out" notices. In sever- al households people were reduced to cooking on kerosene stoves and eating by candle-light. Disasters of this kind usually bring to light several human stories, There was the story of the express train saved from rn almost inevi- table crash by the initiative of a father and his son who, by one of those strange turns of fate, hap- ened to pass an embankment that fad Just subsided. The father telephoned the local stationmaster, but it was already too Iate to stop the express by means , of signals, The only hope was to stop it themselves. Father and son ran half-a-mile along the track esticulating wildly to the oncom- g traifi; the train was going fast and, before the driver could halt | it, it was on the brink of the wash- away where about fifty yards of Hne were suspended, thirty feet above the ground. A few seconds more, and the express would have plunged 200 feet into the valley. pair of shoes, try a dowsing pendu- - place insulating board made from straw in a position to compete with similar material made from wood. - * * is knee deep in chen.urgic research with the National Research Coun- cil." It probably serves them right, and we only hope it comes off more easily than the oil a young lady of our acquaintance, aged ten, got on her fair skin when she went knee- deep into the limpid waters of Lake Ontario, in the vicinity of Sunny- side, the oil being it would seem, a by-producet of modern chemical progress. ENGLAND, 1847 I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that 'she has seen dark days before; indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a Thus, the next time you feel like putting out that camp fire, lest you, burn down a few thousand acres of wood-pulp forest, just don't bother, little better in a cloudy day, and that The chemurgists have it all under in storm of battle and calamity, she control. has a secret vigor and a pulse like « * * a cannon. I see her in her old age, Carl Miner--it- says here he's a not decrepit, but young, and still | "chemist" not a "chemurgist" but daring to believe in her power of probably he's working hard for his endurance and expansion. Seeing second stripe--sought to find out this, I say, All haill mother of na- how waste corncobs and oat hulls tions, mother of heroes, with could contribute to better living. strength' still equal to the time; (And what a sequence that will still wise to entertain and swift | make in a movie, with Carl going to execute the policy which the up and interviewing oat hull after mind and heart of mankind requires oat hull, corncob after corncob, in the present hour, and thus only saying, "What can you contribute, hospitable to the foreigner, and etc." only to have George Raft or truly a home to the thoughtful and Betty Grable pop out and frustrate encrous who are born in the soll. him.) o let it bel So let it bel * * . --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Heat When you think its hot, consider Asizia. _ That's a town in northwestern * * * At all events our thanks to the ehemurgists and their press repre- sentatives, for their assistance in filling up a column. Right now, for no good reason, we feel like wind- ing up with our favorite--printable --story, * a * It's the one, of course, about the city visitor who was sitting on the farmhouse verandah. To his aston- ishment he saw a horse out in the field romping around, butfing into trees, stumps, fence posts and every other sort-of obstacle available, "My goodness, is that poor horse blind?" asked the visitor. * * * "Not ae bit of it," answered the Anyway, Mr, Miner did years of experimental work on these mate- rials--not Mr, Raft or Miss Grable --and discovered that they would . give out with a chemical called "fur- fucal." It las become an important ingredient in the manufacture of Lybia, about 25 miles south of petroleum, nylon, synthetic resins farmer. "He just don't give a Tripoli, where the highest temper- and antiseptics, it says here. damn. ature ever recorded under standard * . : : soared to 136.4 degrees, notes the Which is O.K. with us, too--al- TOO FUSSY 1922. On that day the thermometer conditions was taken on Sept. 13, National Geographic Society. If you prefer to confine your though we can't help thinking what a swell College Cheer you could make starting with furfural. "Fur- fural, fural, chem--ur--gee"" and so A man with a lot of baggage stood cussing on the Albuquerque A " platform. "S'mattter?" asked the research on heat extremes to North on. Still, you can't have everything. station agent. "I had to get that America, visit Death Valley in « . * Super-Chief." i Sanat southern California. An official uper-Uhiel," was the explanation, "Averaged seventy an hour for ninety miles and busted two springs --and then I miss it by a single minute." "My goodness," comment- ed the agent. "Anybody seeing the way you're carrylng on would think you'd missed it by an hour!" reading of 134 degrees has been Out in Idaho a potato-growing taken there at the United States community is richer by five million Weather Bureau station on the dollars each year simply because of Valley's edge. Even higher tem- a new industry which manufactures peratures, ranging up to 150 de- white starch from culled potatoes. grees, may occur in the low-lying Our informant doesn't mention the interior. chemurgists in regard to this, but i po ) (BN «oil, 5 CHEATS DEATH AS GIRL BRAVES BLAZE Ethel Dawson, 15, of Orono, Ont., prevents tragedy as home burns pounded with fear for the children's safety. Re-entering the house, she aroused her parents, Less than 6 minutes after all were safe, the house was a mass of flames. "We were evexywhere se Dave Ethel to thank for being alive," said She Jrided the children down the stairs and . Dawson later, We are proud to present $ Carrying young Dick, she tried to THE DOW AWARD to Et the other two -- although her own hears Orono, Ont. Feo Dawion of K>»s MONTREAL PE TEE in -- I ER, » wy ; i. . \ IS |!