Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/168

156 used for robes, as linings for garments, etc. About 500,000 skins are taken yearly. The hair of the badger is fine, silky, and very long, especially behind. At the roots it is of a yellowish gray, black in the middle, and white at the tip. The skins were formerly made into pouches by the Highlanders. The dressed skins make the best pistol-furniture, and the hair is much used to make artists' brushes for spreading the colors and softening the shades in painting. Some 50,000 skins are sent to market annually.

The white or polar bear is an enormous animal, weighing sometimes 1,000 or 1,500 pounds; is wholly carnivorous, and feeds upon seals and other animals. The fur is long, fine, soft, woolly, and of a silvery-white color tinged with yellow. Its skin makes a magnificent robe. In the northern regions the skins of bears furnish the most useful and comfortable winter apparel. They are made into beds, coverlets, caps, gloves, and other articles of clothing. The black bear has hair comparatively soft and glossy. Its skin is used for hammer-cloths of carriages, pistol-holsters, rugs, caps, etc. The cinnamon bear of the Rocky Mountains has a more valuable fur than that of the black bear, of which it appears to be a variety.

There are various other animals that furnish robes of different quality and appearance, such as the wolverine, or glutton, the wild-cat, the coyote, or prairie-wolf, the different varieties of the white wolf, which is sometimes called the mountain or timber wolf. The growing scarcity of wild animals, and the resources of modern art, are gradually introducing into use various fabrics as artificial robes, many of them convenient and comfortable, and some of them even elegant and very desirable.



ITAL force; whence is it derived? What is its relation to the other forces of Nature? The answer of modern science to these questions is: It is derived from the lower forces of Nature; it is related to other forces much as these are related to each other it is correlated with chemical and physical forces.

At one time matter was supposed to be destructible. By combustion or by evaporation matter seemed to be consumed to pass out of existence; but now we know it only changes its form from the solid