To
avoid using DDT and other pesticides, more and more U.S. communities are turning
to nature for help. The latest to do so are Claremont, Calif., and Albuquerque,
N. Mex., whose residents have imported thousands of ladybugs to control millions
of sap-sucking aphids. Claremonters report that ladybugs are cheaper than chemical
sprays: $ 85 for 375,000 ladybugs v. $ 180 for a chemical spray used in Claremont
last year.
Moreover, a single ladybug devours as many as 40 or 50 aphids a day. Ladybugs
are also easy to handle. The gardener should first cool them in his refrigerator
to make them drowsy, then remove them at sunset and spread them around. When
the bugs awaken, they are hungry. They gobble away until most aphids are gone.
Pearls are delicate
and require care. They must be worn frequently and close to the skin or they
fade and die. This is perhaps because, as a product of the oyster, they are
partly of animal origin. The most noted specimen was the famous "Theirs
Necklace," of 145 finely graded rose pink pearls. When Madame Theirs willed
them to the French Republic, they were placed in a museum and. never worn.
In time, they lost their color and luster. A "pearlmother" was found
for them, who fondled them and wore them publicly under guard, and their beauty
returned. We are told that pearls must be worn against the human flesh to retain
their life and luster. In fact, it is so important they be worn, that banks
where pearls are stored hire girls for that purpose. The girls sit a specified
number of hours and wear pearls which clients have left with the bank for safekeeping.
These pearls are kept "alive" by human contact.
On a single antenna
of ordinary June beetle, there are as many as twenty thousand olfactory pits.
The bombardier beetle employed gas against his enemy centuries before the Oriental
invented a stinkpot or man resorted to gas warfare. The dragonflies have eyes
with as many as thirty thousand facets, to furnish the intense vision required
in capturing darting, fast- flying prey.
When temperatures fall
toward the freezing point, wise motorists put antifreeze in their radiators.
Many wise insects do much the same thing, reports biochemist Fred smith of the
University of Minnesota. What's more, their antifreeze is glycerol (glycerin),
a chemical closely resembling the ethylene glycol that is the basis for many
antifreeze brands.
Working with Dr. Peter Dubach, Douglas Pratt and C. M. Stewart, Professor Smith
was studying the hibernating larvae of wood-boring beetles, trying to isolate
the enzymes that digest the cellulose on which the insects live. But when he
ground up the larvae and analyzed the juice, he was surprised to find a considerable
glycerol content. Since the active summer larvae do not contain glycerol, he
guessed that the larvae possessed a mechanism that reacted to cold by producing
glycerol to keep their tissues from freezing in the Minnesota winters.
To check his theory, Professor Smith experimented on black carpenter ants, which
are easy t collect in quantity. Hibernating adult ants proved to have as much
as 10 per-cent glycerol in their bodies, but when the ants were gradually warmed
up and became active, all of it disappeared. Chilling the ants for a few days
at a temperature just above the freezing point restored the glycerol again.
Ants of the same species found in warmer Maryland had no glycerol in them. But
when taken t Minnesota they did as Minnesota ants do, secreting their personal
antifreeze against the cold.
The cocoon of silkworm
can be unreeled to provide a filament over two-thirds of a mile long.
The spider is so well supplied with the silky thread for making its web that
a scientist once drew out of the body of a specimen almost two miles of thread.
The sun is like a vast
hydrogen bomb burning slowly. Every second, 4 million tons of hydrogen are destroyed
in explosions which start somewhere near the core, where the temperature is
13 million degrees Centigrade.
More energy than man has used since the dawn of civilization is radiated by
this normal star in a second.
The earth's entire oil, coal and wood reserves would fuel the sun's energy out-put
to the earth alone for only a few days.
Tongues of hydrogen flame leap from the sun's surface with the force of 1000
million hydrogen bombs. They are forced up by the enormous thermonuclear explosion
at the core of the sun where 564 million tons of hydrogen fuse to form helium.
Material at the core of the sun is so hot that a pinhead of it would give off
enough heat to kill a man 1 million miles away.
15. In South America is a curious little spider which has its home under the
water. It forms a bubble about itself in which, like a diving bell, it sinks
to the bottom of a pond or river. It will remain there for hours, living below,
and yet breathing the air from above. When it returns to the surface it is found
to be perfectly dry. Not the slightest moisture will have penetrated its capsule.
It is in the water and yet separate from it, maintained by contact with the
beyond.
The sun is a great
power plant. If you were to mark off one square yard on the sun you would find
that it is giving of 70,000 horsepower of energy continuously. There are a tremendous
number o square yards on the sun's surface: more than 10,000 times the number
of square yards on the surface of the earth.
Suppose that we decide to buy the energy that the sun gives off for a period
of twenty-four hours. Suppose we can buy this energy for one-fourt cent per
kilowatt-hour. To pay for this energy in silver dollars would require enough
money to cover the United States four miles deep.
This represents a tremendous amount of energy. Yet when God created the sun,
He had to put into that act of creation all of the energy that has come from
the sun and all that which may yet to come from the sun. There is still enough
energy in the sun to last for some thirty billion years.
There is a fish belonging
to the angler group that can puff itself up by swallowing water until its stomach
is distended like a balloon. Presumably this tactic is to render it more difficult
for a predator to swallow. The spitlure frogfish, as it is called, has an even
cleverer device. On top of its head is a built-in wormlike appendage with a
jointed base. When not in use it is rolled up to one side of the dorsal fin,
but in action it is waved around so that it looks for all the world like a juicy
fishworm. The moment a likely victim comes near to investigate, the fish swallows
it in one king-size gulp.
The heart is a hard-working
marvel. It can keep on beating automatically even if all other nerves were severed.
And what a beat!
It beats an average of 75 times a minute, forty million times a year, or two
and a half billion times in a life of 70 years. At each beat, the average adult
heart discharges about four ounces of blood. This amounts to three thousand
gallons a day or 650,000 gallons a year--enough a fill more than 81 tank cars
of 8,000 gallons each.
The heart does enough work in one hour to lift a 150-pound man to the top of
a three-story building, enough energy in twelve hours to lift a 65-ton tank
car one foot off the ground, or enough power in seventy years to lift the largest
battleship afloat completely out of the water.
Imagine a group of
men, working entirely in the dark, constructing a building as complex as the
American Empire State Building and, fitting it with central heating and a fresh-air
system. This is what the termite, that incredible builder, does when it builds
its home.
In Africa, these constructions are so numerous that they transform the landscape.
Each home has at its center the "royal quarter" where the Queen lives
with her king.
The Queen lays nearly 50,000 eggs a day and has a life span of ten years, but
the population of each nest is controlled by frequent migration of the termites
to find mates.
The home maintains a temperature of about 86 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity
at 98 per cent, with ventilation assured. How they manage to achieve this is
a marvel of engineering. The walls are built up to 18 inches thick with cooling
fins on the outside, each containing hundreds of air shafts. The hot, stale
air inside the home passes along these air-shafts and goes out through pores
in the wall. Fresh air is drawn to replace it.
To keep the air at the right temperature, hundreds of tiny workers in the air
passages control the conditions by sealing and unsealing the many air shafts,
according to the conditions of the temperature outside. Some of these structures
reach 20 feet in height. We can therefore imagine what remarkable builders these
termites are.
The longest flight
made by a homing pigeon was the 7,200 miles that one flew in 1931 from Arras,
France to its home in Saigon, Vietnam. To demonstrate that homers are not guided
by landmarks, the bird was taken to France in a covered cage aboard a ship that
crossed the South China Sea, the Mediterranean. The pigeon--straight as an arrow
and over "unfamiliar" land--returned in just 24 days.
Our hours are nothing
to the birds. Why, some birds work in the summer nineteen hours a day. Indefatigably
they clear the crops of insects.
The thrush gets up at 2:30 every morning. He rolls up his sleeves and falls
to work at once, and he never stops till 9:30 at night. A clear nineteen hours.
During that time he feeds his voracious young two hundred and six times.
The blackbird starts work at the same time as the thrush, but he lays off earlier.
His whistle blows at 7:30, and during his seventeen-hour day he sets about one
hundred meals before his kiddies.
Titmouse is up and about at three in the morning, and his stopping time is nine
at night. A fast worker, the titmouse is said to feed his young four hundred
and seventeen meals--meals of caterpillar mainly--in the long, hard, hot day.
All nature, including
man, is a wondrous instrument of many strings, delicately tuned to work God's
will & upon which He plays with a master hand.
Science tells us that
nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace.
Nature does not know extinction, only transformation. If God applies this fundamental
principle to the most minute part of His Universe, doesn't it make sense to
assume that He applies it also to the soul of man?--Wernher Von Braun.
There has been discovered
in the forests of India a strange plant which possesses to a very high degree
astonishing magnetic power. The hand which breaks a leaf from it immediately
receives a shock equal to that produced by the conductor of an induction coil.
At a distance of nineteen feet a magnetic-needle is affected by it, and it will
be quite deranged if brought near. The energy of this singular influence varies
with the hour of the day. It is all-powerful about two o'clock in the afternoon,
but is ineffective during the night. At times of storm, its intensity increases.
Snowflakes have six
sides. It is claimed there are no two snowflakes alike, yet all are hexagonal
in shape. An eminent scientist, J. Wilson Bentley, devoted his life to the study
of snowflakes. He photographed over 10,000 flakes. He found no two exactly alike,
though all have six sides. He claimed that the entire countryside from Maine
to California might be covered with snow a foot deep, yet no two flakes would
be exactly alike.
The camel is enabled,
by the peculiar construction of its stomach, to carry a supply of water sufficient
for seven or eight days together. This power adapts it to the region in which
it is found, and to the service of man in traversing the desert. It has, also,
great acuteness of scent, and, when ready to fail through the weariness of a
long march, will detect the distant stream or fountain. Then new vigor animates
it, and, sniffing the air, it strides on till it can imbibe the refreshing waters.
"I am not so much
of a farmer as some people claim." said Hon. W. J. Bryan in his lecture
on "The Price of Peace." but I have observed the watermelon seed.
It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times
its weight, and when you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it
colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside
of it a white rind and within again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds,
each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times
its weight--when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can
ask me to explain the mystery of God."
There have been a number
of serious mathematical computations which have to do with evolution, and improbable
to the vanishing point. Probably the best known case is the symposium on the
Mathematical Challenge to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, held
at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1966. It was there that a French
mathematician told that when a computer was programmed to give the probability
of an evolutionary advance, it jammed.
The interpretation of this was that the probability was less than one chance
in ten to the one thousandth power! In his closing remarks this man said, "Thus,
to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the Neo-Darwinian
theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it
cannot be bridged within the current biology."
Probability is expressed as a fraction and hence certainty is 1 and impossibility
is 0. On this basis to be helpful to the evolutionists, the author assumed that
the probability of evolution being true (if there were no gaps in the fossil
record) as 999, which then makes the probability of creation the difference
between this and 1, or .001. But there are at least 13 well documented gaps
in the fossil record, and actually there are very many more. But again favoring
the evolutionists by using this very conservative figure of 13, and putting
these numbers in the formula, the result is that the probability of evolution
being true is about one chance is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Thus, even if assumptions are made favoring the position of the evolutionists,
they cannot complain if it still comes out in favor of creation, which it does.
The seed of the globe
turnip is abut one-twentieth of an inch in diameter, and yet, in a few months,
this seed will be enlarged by the soil and the air to 27,000,000 times its original
bulk, and this in addition to a bunch of leaves. It has been fond by experiment
that it will, under fair conditions, increase its own weight 15 times in one
minute. Turnips growing in peat ground will increase more than 15,000 times
the weight of their seeds in one day.
Salt is a wonder. Salt
is composed of two poisonous substances. How is it possible that salt, which
is necessary to life, is composed of sodium and chlorine, either of which, if
taken individually, would kill you?
Water is a wonder. Its chemical formula is H2O. That means it has two parts
of hydrogen for each part oxygen. Oxygen is flammable; hydrogen readily burns.
unite hydrogen and oxygen into water and you put out fires with it!
A French scientist
named Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, examining a wasp's nest in 1719, noted
that it seemed to be made of a type of crude pasteboard. After further investigation
he discovered that most of the material was obtained from tree fibers. As a
result of this study the first successful production of paper from woodpulp
was achieved. Yet God had instilled this ability in the wasp at the dawn of
history.
Every one of God's
works is in its way great. All angels & all men united could not make one
grasshopper.
41. If you're an adult of average weight, here is what you accomplish in 24
hours:
Your heart beats 103,689 times.
Your blood travels 168,000,000 miles.
You breathe 23,040 times,
You inhale 438 cubic feet of air.
You eat 3.25 pounds of food.
You drink 2.9 quarts of liquids.
You lose 7/8 pound of waste.
You speak 4,800 words, including some unnecessary ones.
You move 750 muscles.
Your nails grow .000046 inch.
Your hair grows .01714 inch.
You exercise 7,000,000 brain cells.
Feel tired?
There are some species
of fish--most of them bottom dwellers--that have a most unusual development
cycle, particularly as regards their eyes. The group includes halibuts, flounders.
and places. They pass their early life swimming like any other fish, then a
remarkable change occurs. They turn onto their sides and swim that way the rest
of their lives; hence they are known as flat fish. The most astonishing aspect
of this change is that the eye on the under side moves to the top side of the
fish's head and remains there so that it becomes known as the "eyed side"
while the underneath is referred to as the "blind side."
Researchers Sarif Salem
and Francis D. Hold of the University of Wisconsin made a three-year study and
fond that one colony of ants moved fifteen tons of subsoil, building clusters
of large mounds and burrowing five-and-a-half feet below the surface. The "deep
ploughing" increased the nutrients, clay and organic matter of the surface
soil.
Be encouraged by the
example of the Allegheny ants, a common species in the eastern U.S., which help
enrich forest areas by carrying tons of soil from below ground to the surface.
Scientists have estimated
that throughout the earth 360,000 lightning flashes per hour occur. It is computed
by General Electric officials that the average bolt has a voltage of 100 million,
a current of 100 thousand amperes, and an energy of four kilowatt hours. Thus,
one flash of lightning would keep any house lit for 35 years. And a large bolt
of lightning has enough energy to lift the 51,821-ton ocean liner United States
six feet into the air.
Moreover, by combining
nitrogen and oxygen, lightning creates 100 million tons of plant food a year,
raining down far more than is produced by all the commercial fertilizer plants.
The fact that adult
salmon return from the ocean to the very gravel bed where they were hatched
in some swift-flowing northern stream in order to reproduce before death, is
fairly well-known. But not everyone realizes what is involved in their doing
so.
A salmon swims three to ten miles a day against the current for a total distance
of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of miles to get back to his birthplace.
The spectacular part of his return trip is when he encounters waterfalls that
must be ascended. He has been observed swimming a sheer ten-foot waterfall in
one leap. Higher falls can be conquered by a series of tall leaps from shelf
to shelf for a total distance of maybe forty or fifty feet.
Sea herring, traveling
in closely packed schools too numerous to count have a marvelous faculty for
synchronizing their movements. Even when some floating obstacle compels a group
to divide, with part of them swimming on one side and the rest on the other
side of the obstruction, their rhythmic motion continues in absolute unison
as if they were one instead of thousands. They coordinate their movements up
or down, right or left, as if subject to a command control.
The dolphin has special
membranes analogous to man's vocal cords. It can make a variety of noises such
as chirps, pops, clicks, squeaks, groans, whines, and other sounds in frequencies
from 3000 to 30,000 cycles per second. researchers say the dolphin can mimic
human-created sounds such as laughter, whistles, and even word syllables in
high frequency ranges. An electronic device, the sceptron, has been contrived
to "memorize" sounds of the dolphins, to catalog dolphin-sounds, and
record communication patterns. It is even speculated that the fish could ultimately
inform man about such matters as missile cones falling into the sea, current
temperatures, land formations, and so on.
The noted agnostic, Colonel
Robert Ingersoll, during a visit with Henry Ward Beecher, noted a beautiful
globe portraying the constellations & stars of the heavens. "This is
just what I've been looking for", he said after examining it. "
Who made it?" "Who made it?" repeated Beecher in simulated astonishment.
"Why Colonel, nobody made it; it just happened."