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National Geographic : 1936 Jul
Contents
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE range from Tom Sawyer to Sir Galahad, as for windows in the playroom of a Cincin nati hospital; or from Euclid, "Father of Geometry," to Charles Darwin, the evo lutionist, as in the chapel rose windows made for Colorado College. For the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, one great window made here tells the History of Healing. The figures shown begin with ancient Imhotep, the early Egyptian doctor; then comes Hip pocrates, and Avicenna, the Arabian physi cian. Pasteur, Lister, Florence Nightin gale, and Edith Cavell are also shown. So is the Boston dentist, William T. G. Mor ton, who demonstrated the use of ether as escape from pain during surgery. Larger medallions in this window show Christ miraculously healing the lepers, the blind and the halt, the raising of Lazarus, and the casting out of devils. To make these often huge, heavy, and costly windows, artists first draw designs on small scale, after which the cartoon, or full-size drawing is made (Plate XVI). From this a paper plan is copied and cut into pattern pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle; these patterns are followed exactly in cutting the bits of various-colored glass, whose correct arrangement forms the de sign, and which are held together by grooved strips of lead. Workmen hundreds of years ago used almost these same methods, and knew per fectly the color values of stained glass, which, as some one said, can make the inside of a cathedral seem like a lonely forest at twilight. Windows of the chapel at Princeton Uni versity are great epics of literature-"Par adise Lost," "The Divine Comedy," "Pil grim's Progress," all as recorded in colored glass by a Boston artist. MAKING A SILK PURSE FROM A SOW'S EAR From this centuries-old art Boston takes a long stride to the magic of modern chem ical science. "We got 100 sow ears from a Chicago packer," said a chemist in the Arthur I). Little laboratories, "and made a silk purse. Here it is. No, it isn't very good silk, or very strong, but it is silk (Plate IX). "How did we do it? Well, briefly, by finding out just how the silkworm does it. He emits a viscous liquid which, on reaching the air, turns into silk thread. That liquid, we found, was much like glue. So we took glue from a sow's ear, and sought to make it act just like the silk worm's fluid. The rest was straight lab oratory work. "We never intended, of course, to make silk from sows' ears to sell; we were only playing! There is more wood and cotton fiber at hand for making artificial silk than there are pigs' ears." How to build better cedar chests, chests more discouraging to moths which now de stroy each year more than $200,000,000 worth of our woolen clothes and rugs, was another riddle handed to the chemists. Solving it, they raised swarms of moths to study their diets, breathing habits, and reactions to poisons. Mercury vapor, for example, though fatal to other forms of life, was found to stimulate moths, making them larger and more vigorous. But adequate vapor of cedar oil, as exuded from cedar wood, was found to kill the moth by harm to its skin and breathing machine. Another odd task here has to do with smells. If you make glue, soap, or linoleum, or tan leather, run a fertilizer factory, or use a bookbinder's paste whose odor makes your workmen sick and drives customers away, these chemists will suppress it for you. Not only that, they can trade you a pleasant smell for that unwanted stench. In working silk into stockings, for ex ample, oil is added to make the silk more easily handled. Later this gets rancid. One hosiery maker, to overcome this, mildly perfumed the stockings. Then, by actual tests, kept secret from sales girls, it was found the scented stockings outsold the others by 34 per cent! In the same way chemistry now supplies pleasing odors to cosmetics, soaps, and pharmaceuticals, as well as to manufac tured foods and beverages. Without our sense of smell, these chemists say, apples, celery, and onions would all taste much alike. Fragrant, acid, burnt, and caprylic (goaty) are the four basic smells which the human nose can detect-. With these come infinite combinations, of which a well trained "smell expert" may identify up wards of 60 before his nose gets tired. (When such nasal nerve fatigue overtakes a perfumer, he sniffs some gum camphor to reawaken his olfactory senses.) An ingenious chart shows the character
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