Why we can see smoke
Dear St. Nicholas: Will you please tell me in “Nature and Science” what smoke is? If it is a gas, how can we see it?
Smoke is not composed of gases only, but of solid, or perhaps partly liquid, particles, which are mixed with the gases and carried along by them. It is these particles of matter that are visible to the eye, and not the gases themselves.
Remarkable twining of honeysuckle vine
Dear St. Nicholas: The accompanying photograph is of a section of an oak-tree about which a wild honeysuckle has
Close twining of honeysuckle about a twisted oak branch.
twined. The vine is about an inch in diameter. It somewhat resembles a mammoth corkscrew.
Discovered flowers on one-year raspberry “cane”
Dear St. Nicholas: We have a black raspberry, or “blackcap,” bush near our front porch. The other day I was surprised to see flower buds on one of the canes that had grown up this year. As the berries are usually borne on the two-year-old canes, it seemed that there must have been unusual vigor in the plant or some other reason for this thing. Can you give me any light? I am much interested in berries and berry-growing.
Your reader and friend,
S. Merrill Foster (age 16).
Most of the varieties of black raspberries—in commerce known as “blackcaps”— produce strong canes one season, on which, the following year, are borne the fruiting branches, after which this cane dies. Unusual conditions, however, often result in unusual developments, so that this rule is not always strictly adhered to in nature, though the normal blackcap raspberry is more regular in this respect than most of its near relatives.
There are a number of red raspberries, for instance, which make a regular practice of fruiting freely in the fall on the terminals of that year’s growth. It may be, in the instance you cite, that the stems producing these late flower buds were in reality extra strong shoots borne from near the base of the terminal stems of last year. After all, if this blackcap is a seedling, and shows a tendency to produce flower buds on new canes, it might be worth your while to give it ample opportunity to develop, as it may prove to be a new variety which would have value for garden purposes. Ernest F. Coe.
Humming-birds
Dear St. Nicholas: Outside the windows of my room is a window-box. I often sit and watch the humming-birds which visit the box. One day, I saw as many as six in half an hour. I have noticed that a humming-bird will hover before a flower, and after sipping the honey from it, will fly on to another, and a second bird will come and pause in the air before the flower, about a foot away, and, apparently finding nothing in it, go onto another. Can they see into the flower at that distance, or is it true that they do not get honey but tiny insects from it? If that is so, can they hear the insects so far away?
Your devoted and interested reader,
Katharine B. Scott.
Humming-birds are known to feed very largely on insects which they gather from the flowers, but whether they can hear insects from a distance, I am sure I do not know.—Frank M. Chapman, Curator of Birds, American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
Cracks in hands and faces
Dear St. Nicholas: Will you please tell me why cracks get in your hands and fingers when you get them very wet? I would like to know very much.
Your loving reader,
Theodore McClintock.
The tissues of the body have more salts than are usually found in fresh water. When you have more salt on one side of an animal membrane than on the other, nature tries to equalize the amount on both sides. Salts, leaving the tissues of the hands to go into the water, leave the cells partly emptied of their contents. They do not hold together well, and “cracks” result.—Robert T. Morris
