Part 21

Sometimes when you cry, or lose control of yourself in some other way (you know, of course, that in crying you always lose control of yourself, don’t you) practically the same effect is produced as when you have something in your stomach that should come out. Crying, or the thing that happens sometimes when we cry, makes the throat muscles act just as if we were vomiting, and as the action is an unnatural one, when the ring or wave reaches the top of the throat, we feel the lump or ball as we call it. We feel the lump because the throat has been made to go through the motion of eliminating something in an unnatural way, just as your arm will hurt if you pretend to have a ball or a stone in it, and in throwing the imaginary ball or stone, you put the same force into your movements as you would if you had an actual ball or stone in your hand and were seeing how far you could throw it.

Why Do We Stop Growing?

We eventually stop growing because certain of the cells of the body lose their ability of increasing in size and producing other cells. It is one of the marvels of the construction of the human body that this is so and one of the wisest provisions also. At first the cells of the body crave lots of food and increase in size, divide and then the parts go on growing until they become of a certain size, when they again divide and each part goes on growing, etc., and thus we grow. A growing boy needs more fond than a mature man, because he needs some of it to grow with, while the man only has to keep what growth he has going, i. e., alive.

We say this limit of growth is a wise provision of nature because if there were no limit to the size we might become, we would not know how large to build houses, barns, etc., or else we would have to build them so large to start with that we would be lost in them for a long time. We would constantly be forced to change these things and there would be no basis to reckon from. Dogs might be as big as elephants and then they would be of no use to us, or of what use would a dog as big as an elephant be to a boy of five years. You see it would not do at all to have this rule changed.

Why Do We Grow Aged?

We age directly in accordance with the lives we lead. You can bend a wire back and forth a number of times at the same point without breaking it, but eventually it will break. Just so with the human body. You can use each part of it for its own purposes a number of times, but eventually the break will come. Or, you can fail to make a part of it perform its regular functions, and it will die--the break will come. The human body is the most wonderful machine in the world, but even it will eventually wear out. Every time you move your arm, leg or some other part of your body, you destroy some tissues. The body replenishes and builds up those tissues again for a certain time. When you bend a joint in your body, the body oils the joint naturally, but as you grow older, or rather, as you use the different parts of your body more and more, it brings nearer always the time, when the body cannot, of its own accord, build up again the tissues you have destroyed. That is why some people become very old at forty and others are still comparatively young at seventy. It requires a great deal of care and attention and the elimination of all abuse of the body to keep us young when we are old. The use of drink, lack of sufficient sleep and other abuses prevent the body from restoring the tissues which have been destroyed. Worry and sorrow age us very rapidly, because these things affect the nerves. If the nerves are not quiet we cannot get any rest and without rest we grow old very rapidly.

What Causes Wrinkles?

Wrinkles come to us in several ways. An easy way to cause wrinkles is to scowl and frown and get into the habit of doing this. When you scowl or frown you pucker up the skin on your forehead into wrinkles and if you continue the habit the skin on your forehead makes the wrinkles permanent. You have given your skin the wrinkle habit. This acts just the same way as your arm would, if you tied it up in a sling and held it close to your side for a very long time--a number of weeks. When you took the sling off you would find your arm useless--a dead arm. It had developed the habit of doing nothing.

In old people, however, wrinkles come more naturally. There it is the case of the skin not receiving the proper nourishment and attention to keep the circulation of the blood right. When people become old they are apt to lose the fat which has accumulated under their skins. If they had taken just the right amount of exercise all of their lives and kept their circulation perfect in all parts of the body, there would have been no fat there. But when the fat accumulates, it makes the skin grow larger, and then when the fat disappears and people get thin again, the skin is too large and makes the wrinkles.

Does Thunder Sour Milk?

Milk will sour in any kind of warm and moist temperature and, because just before and during a thunderstorm the air is generally quite warm and moist, it is only natural that it should turn sour. It is wrong, however, to say or think that thunder makes milk sour. Thunder is only a noise and noise cannot do anything but make itself heard. The fact that it is generally warm and moist, however, when it thunders, coupled with the fact that these conditions of the air sour milk very rapidly, have led people to connect the two in their minds and caused them to fall into the error of believing that the thunder is responsible for the change in the milk.

What Makes the Rings in the Water When I Throw a Stone Into It?

Every movement has a beginning. When a movement on the earth is once started it keeps on going until something stops it. If nothing stops it it will go on forever.

When you shout you start air waves going in every direction, which keeps on going until stopped by something which has the power to break up their waves.

When you throw a stone into the ocean you start a series of ripples or waves which spread out in every direction and if you dropped your stone into the exact middle of the ocean--half way from each side--in a perfectly calm sea undisturbed by other forces, your ring of ripples would go on getting larger until it landed on the beach or shore on each side of the ocean at the exactly the same time and there the beach or shore would stop it.

The original ring of ripples is caused by the fact that when you drop a stone into the water it disturbs the water where it goes in and the water moves away from the stone to the sides, and as the stone goes down, over and up above it, and the whole body of the water is disturbed in such a way that makes the ripple appear on the surface and spread out in every direction. As the stone goes down into the water further and further the disturbance is repeated and ring after ring appears on the surface.

Of course there are many disturbances in the water at all times. Many things may happen to break up your little ring of ripples before they touch the sides of the ocean--a ship--a fish--the wind--or one of many other things, and because this is true you would have difficulty in sending the waves made by your little pebble across the ocean, but you can take a dishpan from the kitchen and after filling it with water drop pebbles into it as nearly the middle as possible, and you will see the ripples or waves your pebble makes spread out from the point where the pebble entered the water in all directions.

Why Are There Many Languages?

Different languages developed in different parts of the world because there was no inter-communication between people in different communities, and each was really developing a language for itself. In doing so they developed their language without knowing that other communities were working out the same problems for themselves. So they first developed their own sign and gesture language and later on their word or sound language and kept on using it. While they may thus have developed the use of some of the same signs and sounds or combination of sounds to express one thing perfectly understandable to themselves, these sounds or combinations of sounds might mean something entirely different to another community, where that particular sound or combination of sounds may have been hit upon to mean something entirely different.

Of course, not all languages were developed in this way. There are, you know, a great many languages used in the world. Some of them are offshoots of others, where part of a community moved to another part of the world, taking their language with them, but developing it further along new lines, and using new combinations of sounds for new words. Then also, there are many words which mean the same thing in different languages and are spoken with practically the same sounds. This is due to the movement of people from one nation to another and bringing their own words with them, so to speak. In many instances a stranger would come to another nation, and use his own word for expressing a certain thing and that would eventually be taken up and used as a better word, and the old word dropped. It is strange that this should be true, but this accounts for the fact that many words are the same in sound and meaning in numerous languages.

What Makes a Match Light When We Strike It?

The match lights when we rub it along a rough substance, because the rubbing produces sufficient heat on the end of the match to set fire to the head, as we call it, which is made of chemicals that light more easily than the stick of wood, which is the rest of the match. The fire thus started is hot enough and burns long enough to set fire to the wooden part of the match.

To explain this more fully, let me say this. Rub your finger quickly along your coat sleeve or along the seat of your trousers, long a favorite place for men to strike matches, pretending that your finger is a match. You find the end of your finger becomes warm, don’t you? Not warm enough to set your finger on fire, of course, but if you had the same combination of chemicals on the end of your finger that there is on the match, you would set the chemicals afire and this would burn your finger, just as it sets fire to the wooden part of the match.

It took a great many years to discover the combination of chemicals of which the head of the match is made. Before that discovery was made it was far from easy to light the light in the evening as it is now. It must have been a serious thing to let the fire go out in the furnace in those days.

What Makes the Kettle Whistle?

The kettle whistles only when the water boils and the steam or gas which is the form the water turns into when boiling is trying to escape through the spout of the kettle. You see, when the water starts boiling, the inside of the kettle is at once filled with steam and more is coming out of the water all the time. This steam must get out some way, so it rushes for the spout of the kettle, and because so much of it is trying to get out of a comparatively small opening at once there is quite a pressure and this results in making the whistle out of the spout of the kettle. It is just the same process as when you whistle yourself. To whistle you fill your mouth with air and force it out through your lips, which you have closed excepting for a small opening, by the pressure you can bring to bear with the roof and sides of your mouth, and if you have learned to make your lips into the proper shape and apply the pressure steadily you can sound a very long note and make different notes by making the opening in your lips large or small. The kettle spout has only one size of opening so the sound is practically the same at all times though louder at sometimes than at others. This is caused by the varying pressure at which the steam in the kettle is being forced out.

What Makes the Water From a Fountain Shoot Into the Air?

The water from the fountain shoots into the air because water anywhere will run down if given a chance. To produce a fountain you must have a source of water supply for the fountain which is higher than the openings of the fountain out of which the water shoots. The water comes out of the holes in the fountain for the same reason that it comes out of the faucet in the kitchen or bath room. In the latter case the water comes from the waterworks reservoir in which the level of the water is much higher than the opening in the faucet in your home. Being higher the water in the reservoir is trying to get away through the pipes all the time and all the pipes leading from the reservoir are full of this water trying to get away. Just as soon as you turn the valve in the faucet the water comes out and runs down into the bowl.

If you were to turn the opening of the faucet up instead of down as it is, the water would shoot up instead of down. Not very much, it is true, but it would act much like the water from the fountain. The reason it does not shoot up high in the air like a fountain is because the opening in the faucet is the same size as the opening in the little pipe which leads the water from the street into the house. If you would turn the opening of the faucet up and attach to it a pipe which made the opening much smaller (the size of the opening in the fountains), you would see the water shoot into the air just as it does from the fountain. When you reduce the size of the opening you increase the pressure of the water coming from the pipes in proportion to the reduction you have made in the size of the opening.

Water from the fountain will not, however, shoot as high as the level of the water in the reservoir because, as soon as it leaves the pipes, it encounters the pressure of the air outside the pipes and the law of gravitation which pulls all things toward the center of the earth.

It is not natural for water to shoot into the air as it does in a fountain. The only way water can go naturally is down, and it only goes up a little way from a fountain because of the pressure of the water in the pipes behind the openings in the pipes in the fountain.

What Keeps a Balloon Up?

A balloon stays up in the air, because of the air in it, together with the weight of the balloon, is less than an equal bulk of the air in which it floats.

In former days of ballooning the balloons were filled with hot air and were then found to rise and stay up until the air inside of the balloon became of the same temperature as that in which it floated. When this stage was reached, the balloon itself would fall because the material of which it was made was denser than air.

Today balloonists fill their balloons with gas which is lighter than air, even when as cool as the air in which they rise and are thus able to stay up a long time.

You, of course, have seen many of the red, white and blue paper balloons which are sent up on the Fourth of July. You will remember that father, or whoever it is that is sending them up, lights the oil-soaked knot of cloth that is attached to the balloon immediately below the opening at the bottom. He first lights this and then holds the balloon for a time with his hands.

Soon, however, you will remember that the balloon starts upward with father still holding it. This is because the air inside the balloon is becoming heated. You will notice also that at first he has to hold out the sides of the top of the balloon with his hands or has some one help him do this, but that even so the balloon does not stand out round and full as it should. When the balloon starts to rise, however, you will notice that it is round and full. This is because the air in the balloon has become heated and is expanding. Soon the balloon is tugging to get away and father lets go and it rises and sails away with the wind. As long as the fire below it burns, and if the wind does not upset it so as to make the paper part catch fire, the balloon will stay up; but, when the fire burns out, the balloon will come down.

The balloon merely rises because the air inside, and held there by the covering of the balloon, is warmer air and lighter than the air on the outside.

Why Did People of Long Ago Live Longer Than We Do Now?

When reading of people who lived long years ago and especially when reading about the length of their lives, we are told that in the old days people lived longer than they do now. Some of the early historical records speak of single individuals who lived hundreds of years. There is great doubt as to whether these statements are founded on fact. In thinking about this we must first take into consideration that these records of long ages were recorded at a time when man had no accurate ideas of the actual passage of long periods of time such as a year. They did not have our calendar as a basis for figuring at all. Learned men now tell us that the actual age of men who lived at the time these records of great ages were recorded probably lived shorter lives than we do now, and that what they record as a period of one year was probably a much shorter period than one year.

It is true beyond the question of a doubt that the people of today live longer on the average than people who lived ten, twenty or more years ago.

In other words, the average period of life has increased steadily. This is due to the fact that we have taken great care of our bodies; have improved the conditions in which we live, and made them more sanitary; have learned to fight and check and eradicate diseases, which only a few years ago we could not prevent people dying of when they once contracted them, and we know from the records which we keep that actually people live longer on the average today than only a few years ago, and it is safe to say that they live longer now on the average than at any time in the world’s history.

Is There a Reason for Everything?

The world is so constructed that there must be a reason or cause for everything. There are so many forces in the world that man has not yet been able to locate the original cause of every one of them. Concerning other things, he sees the effects without having any knowledge of the forces which are their cause. Other things he has never even bothered to inquire about, but simply takes them for granted. But every force, which means, of course, everything in the world, must have had a beginning and therefore something or a combination of things must have caused it to begin, and the thing or things that caused it to be is the reason for its being. Every little while someone makes a discovery of some new force, and then we suddenly realize that this force has been in existence all the time although not known to man, and we discover through this the reason for many other things being as they are.

The other thing or side of the question is also true. We cannot have a cause without an effect. You cannot do anything without causing something to happen and producing an effect on one or more other objects either animate or inanimate. You cannot move your hand without creating some disturbance in the air. When you make a noise, low or loud, you produce sound waves. When you burn a stick of wood, you create smoke, ashes and gases of various kinds. You change the whole nature of what was the piece of wood, and yet no particle of what made the stick of wood is ever destroyed or lost, but appears in some other thing in the air or on or in the earth.

What Makes an Echo?

An echo is caused when the waves of air which you create when you shout are thrown back again when they are stopped by something they encounter and are turned back without changing their shape. Any kind of a sound wave will make an echo in this way.

You see, you can have no sound of any kind without sound waves. You could not make a sound if there were no air. Now, when you shout, you start a series of sound waves that go out from you in every direction and they spread away from you in circles just like the rings of ripples that are caused when you drop a stone into a pool of water. You can prove this to yourself easily by having one, two, three or more of your friends stand around you in a large circle. You can place them as far away from you as your shout can be heard if you wish. When you shout, each of your friends will hear the shout at the same time, provided, of course, they are at equal distances from you.

Sometimes these sound waves as they go away from you in circles strike objects that turn the waves back unbroken just as they came to them. The waves will bounce back just like a rubber ball from a wall against which it has been thrown and this is the echo. However, some things that the sound waves strike break up these waves entirely and others

## partially.