Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/401

Rh greedily attacked by a grub and by microscopic enemies. The paste, too, is apt to spoil by heating. Hence it is found to be most economical to make the oil where the nuts grow. The nuts, when broken up with their coverings, yield about thirty-six per cent, of oil; cleared of their coverings, the kernels give sixty per cent. When cold-pressed, the oil is clear and amber-colored. When left to stand, it gives a solid deposit of a crystalline appearance. It makes a soap of excellent quality, and having a certain degree of hardness—a property which makes it valuable to mix with other oils that give too soft soaps. When refined, it makes an excellent lubricating oil, and gives a light that leaves nothing to be desired. The catalogue of the Permanent Exposition of the French Colonies names some fifteen other species of plants the fruits of which yield oils. One of the most valuable of them is the Omphalea diandra (D'Aublet), a large vine of the Spurge family, which bears seeds with very hard and black, horny shells. The shells are used for making beads. The kernel contains a very limpid, amber-colored oil, which is excellent for illumination, for making soap, and for lubricating purposes, and of which the yield is 64·58 per cent.

 

RITICISM would be greatly diminished in bulk if there were excluded from it all that part devoted to disproving statements which have not been made; and were this course pursued, the work "On Mr. Spencer's Formula of Evolution," by Malcolm Guthrie, would disappear bodily. It is little else than a misstatement of certain fundamental views of mine, and then an elaborate refutation of the views as misstated.

Let me first show by brief extracts from "First Principles" what these views are. In a chapter on "Ultimate Scientific Ideas," after showing how the hypothesis that matter consists of solid atoms commits us to alternative impossibitiesimpossibilities [sic] of thought, I have shown how the hypothesis of Boscovich, that matter consists of centers of force without extension, is unthinkable. In the course of the argument I have pointed out that though Boscovich's hypothesis can not be realized in thought, yet, on the other hand, the hypothesis of extended atoms itself implies an imaginary separableness of each atom into parts, and again of these into parts, and so on without limit until unextended centers of force are reached: the consciousness of force being that which alone perpetually emerges. And I have ended by saying that 